You’ve seen them fight — and fouetté — on TV. Now you can catch them live. Salt Lake City’s Ballet West, whose dramas were aired in the reality-TV show “Breaking Pointe,” is performing at City Center’s annual Fall for Dance Festival, one of the hottest tickets of the season.
The big difference is you’ll really see the company dance. “Breaking Pointe” had plenty of soap opera, especially the off-and-on relationship of love-struck Rex Tilton and career-oriented Allison DeBona. But at City Center, you can see a whole ballet — the sparkling, 25-minute “Paquita” — instead of mere snippets.
On Oct. 2 and 3, three of the TV show’s seven dancers will be in New York: Christiana Bennett and Tilton leading the cast, and Beckanne Sisk, a recent winner of dance’s Princess Grace award, performing a solo.
Sisk says she sometimes found the show hard to watch. “If I said I was 19 one more time, I would have reached into the TV and strangled myself,” she says. “The Beckanne you saw dancing — that’s the real me.”
Other things will be the same as on TV. Bennett, the meticulous principal dancer, still has her routines. Her miniature stuffed cow, Moorina, a part of her pre-show ritual, will be coming to New York in its own travel pocket.
Other highlights of the Fall for Dance Festival, running Sept. 27 to Oct. 13, include “Five Movements, Three Repeats,” a new work by Christopher Wheeldon (Sept. 27 to 28) and Jodi Melnick’s “Solo (Re)Deluxe Version” (Oct. 4 to 6), an atmospheric work whose score will be played live by the group People Get Ready. More good news: Tickets are just $15. If you can’t snag one in advance, there’s a line each night to wait for cancellations at the box office, 131 W. 55th St.; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org.
Here are more picks from the season’s crop:
New York City Ballet opens its season Tuesday with a program that’s hard to beat: a quintessential “Greek trilogy” of Balanchine masterworks, “Apollo,” “Orpheus” and “Agon.” Its gala on Thursday promises new costumes by Valentino, while Justin Peck — a member of the corps de ballet and a rising choreographer — debuts “Year of the Rabbit,” his second ballet for the company, Oct. 5; details at nycballet.org, 212-496-0600.
American Ballet Theatre will jam a month’s worth of dancing into five days (Oct. 16 to 20) next month at City Center. The season concentrates on shorter repertory masterworks including Antony Tudor’s wistful “The Leaves Are Fading” and Agnes de Mille’s jaunty “Rodeo.” Hoping to take its place among them, Alexei Ratmansky is creating a new ballet to Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony; 212-581-1212, nycitycenter.org.
Wim Wenders’ documentary “Pina” has brought the late German dance-theater genius Pina Bausch to an even wider audience. Her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, will bring her final work, “. . . como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si . . .” (Like moss on a stone), to BAM Oct. 18 to 27. Bausch’s later works were formed as the company toured the globe — this was inspired by Santiago, Chile. The dances can ramble, but there’s always something unforgettable in them; 718-636-4100, bam.org.