In their ambitious studio series, "Up CLOSE on HOPE," Festival Ballet Providence continues to offer premieres of emerging choreographers’ work, opportunities for new dancers to take the spotlight, and a chance for established choreographers, including artistic director Mihailo "Misha" Djuric, Gianni Di Marco, and Yves de Bouteiller, to have their work performed by well-seasoned dancers. The current program of 10 pieces by six choreographers will be presented November 19 at 7:30 pm and November 20 at 2:30 pm at the company’s studio, 625 Hope Street, Providence.

The 12 segments of de Bouteiller’s 1999 piece, Amadeus Variations, are set to Mozart’s variations on the French folk melody of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Steps and gestures closely echo the changes in tempo and mood of these playful inventions, including an allusion to the folk origins of the music with a tap of one toe behind the other, en pointe. New company member Alexander Akoulov has a chance to show his stuff, both solo

In their annual fall concert, Fusionworks Dance Company will present four new works, all choreographed by artistic director Deb Meunier, plus the reprisal of Slow Run Back, a piece by David Dorfman that was set on the company in 1994. Performances are on November 18 and 19 at 8 pm in Sapinsley Hall at Rhode Island College, with Saturday evening’s show "unwrapped" — i.e., Meunier will offer introductions to each dance that give some ideas about its genesis and production.

Seeing four of the five pieces in rehearsal last week at the company’s East Greenwich studio, I was able to get some of that "unwrapped" experience myself: the lighting designer and the stage manager watched for cues, Meunier and assistant director Stephanie Stanford took notes on technique, and members of Fusionworks II, the apprentice company, got their first crack at the new rehearsal space. (The company still maintains their original studio in Lincoln.)

In keeping with the company’s philosophy of "different

In the past two years, Festival Ballet Providence has commissioned several original ballets — The Widow’s Broom, Scheherazade, and Carmen among them — which have been enthusiastically received by audiences. Following on that success, artistic director Misha Djuric reached for a familiar story, Romeo and Juliet, with familiar music, by Sergei Prokofiev, but he asked California-based choreographer Yves de Bouteiller to create a new ballet for the Providence company. It will open Festival Ballet’s 28th season October 21-23 at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center.

"I wanted to fit the size of the company and the quality of the dancers at Festival," explained Djuric in a recent phone conversation. "Why buy something secondhand when you can buy it specially tailored for you?"

Djuric emphasized that original choreography is another way to make a piece special, instead of learning someone else’s choreography from 40 or 50 years ago. Many ballet fans may have seen the f

Though the images created in contemporary dance might more often suggest emotional landscapes than physical ones, there are always exceptions. Certainly a full-length evening of dance (made up of many short pieces) that focuses on visions of the desert — the creepy (Gila monster) and the crawly (insects), the prickly (giant saguaro) and the pretty (sunflowers) — is out of the ordinary. But that’s precisely what you’ll see when Momix presents Opus Cactus at the Providence Performing Arts Center (October 8 at 8 pm).

Momix is actually the name of a milk supplement for field cows, which comes out of Momix’s founder and artistic director Moses Pendleton’s childhood on a Vermont dairy farm. But Pendleton also wants the name to convey the multi-genre "mix" that’s included in Momix’s performance pieces, from pole-vaulting to puppetry, from athletic prowess to aerial routines. He actually prefers to call his dancers " movement illusionists."

"There’s a great deal of magic in our work, n

North Philadelphian Rennie Harris began dancing professionally in a hip-hop group he co-founded when he was just 14. After a second dance group split up in 1992, Harris, now 41, put together Puremovement, the hip-hop dance troupe that has brought him international acclaim. Puremovement comes to the FirstWorksProv Festival October 1 at 8 pm at the VMA Arts & Cultural Center for a 90-minute show of five classics from their repertory.

Harris and Puremovement brought their hip-hop opera Rome & Jewels to Rhode Island College in 2004, and in an interview with Harris then he told me that if he had not made dancing his life’s work, he "would have been a priest or a preacher." That kind of fervor infuses Harris’s choreography and the workshops he does with young people.

"It started in the late ’60s with the Robot," Harris noted, on the phone from Philly. "A lot of people think of hip-hop as this frivolous thing, and it’s being redefined via the media. People are teaching it and cashing