Ib Andersen began his long, fruitful career as a dancer in the Royal Danish Ballet, where the mime looks so natural that you hardly notice it. The performers seem simply to be talking—silently. “Acting should not be acted,” Andersen once said to the Ballet Arizona crew he led for 24 years, until this past June. “It has to come from your whole body.” He achieves this integrity in his sensitive adaptation of the Petipa-Ivanov Swan Lake, which returns to Ballet Arizona this month, with the Phoenix Symphony in the pit. Andersen’s tenure at George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet also shows. The choreography’s fluidity and grace, both for soloists and across the ensemble, arise from its attunement to the music, that tremendous Tchaikovsky score. The Swan Queen’s corps of swans extends her delectable steps across space. —Apollinaire Scherr