Summer Splash : CRITIC’S PICKS

A regional company trying to earn national renown, Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet brings Kent Stowell’s “Cinderella” to the Orange County Performing Arts Center (June 13-15). Stowell is best known for the production that became “Nutcracker: The Motion Picture” in 1986.

Nobody dances the 19th-Century Russian classics in versions of greater choreographic authenticity than the Royal Ballet, Covent Garden--and nobody producing these ballets takes bigger gambles on design. Anthony Dowell’s 1987 staging of “Swan Lake” will showcase British classicism at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (July 6-9) in the unusual sets of Yolanda Sonnabend.

If anybody dances Balanchine better than New York City Ballet, it’s got to be Edward Villella’s Miami City Ballet, which performs works by Mr. B. and resident choreographer Jimmy Gamonet De Los Heros at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (July 14-16).

Following up on its indispensable program of vintage modern dance solos (“The Indomitable Spirit of Woman”) at the Luckman in February, Bonnie Oda Homsey’s Los Angeles Dance Theatre focuses on the ballet and musical theater innovations of the late Agnes de Mille and the multicultural experiments of Donald McKayle in “Trailblazers: Dancers of Change” at the Ford Amphitheatre (Sept. 1-2).