Curtain up.

The poet William Butler Yeats asked, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" In this issue, we ask, "How can you tell the culture from the training?" For decades, American audiences considered the Russians the purest, most exciting ballet dancers. Whenever we heard a Russian name we thought that dancer must be the real thing. In the 1940s British dancers of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo would add-ova or-ovich to their names to seem more authentic. (And the Ballet Trockadero does it today--to hilarious effect.) Why did we think the Russians had a corner on great dancing? Was it the culture--all those beautifully suffering souls we read about in Russian literature? Or the training, which was brought over from France a hundred years before?

Now we have a new phenomenon in ballet--a profusion of exciting Latin dancers. As Clive Barnes pointed out in his "Attitudes" column in May 2002, the Latins are the new crowd-pleasers. Where we once adored Russian soul, now we swoon over Latin fire. And yet there is a wide range of personalities within the growing group of Hispanic dancers now performing. American Ballet Theatre's Herman and Erica Cornejo, for instance, don't fit the stereotype of Latin passion, but have made their mark in other ways. By talking about the Latins as a whole, we tread a fine line--the line between cultural journalism and insidious stereotyping. Historian Lynn Garafola tries to tease out the differences between what Hispanic dancers gain from their culture and what they gain from their training. In order to trace the roots of the Latin phenomenon, we bring you reports from two hot spots for training: the school of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba and Victor Ullate's school in Spain. And Elizabeth Kendall interviews former Kirov ballerina Irina Kolpokova about her insights while coaching some of the rising Latin stars at ABT.

This year for our Fall Preview we are doing something different. Instead of asking our critics to predict the most significant events of the season, we asked dancers in seven dance-rich cities to tell us, in a personal way, what they are looking forward to seeing. We hope their observations will inspire you to go out and see more dance--perhaps something you've never seen before!