Even if you don’t know the name Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, you might recall the twirling aristocrats dressed with voluptuous rigor in Joe Wright’s 2012 feature Anna Karenina. It is at the ball that Anna meets her doom: the handsome, suddenly no longer bored Count Vronsky, with whom she strays from the stylized choreography of genteel romance into passion, both on the dance floor and elsewhere. The Moroccan-Belgian choreographer—now director of the regularly exciting contemporary dance troupe, Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève—has always been fascinated by the oxymoron of codified gesture: spontaneous expression bound by convention. So it’s no surprise that for Vienna’s year-long, citywide 200th birthday party for its native “Waltz King,” Johann Strauss II, Cherkaoui has returned to the waltz, the perfect symbol of giddy romance corseted by severe social strictures. Imperial Waltz, for his Geneva troupe, artfully injects Taiko drumming into the Strauss waltzes—one form of imperial power interpolated into another. Theater and film designer Tim Yip, of Crouching Tiger fame, dips the stage in red and cream—the women’s gowns and men’s Napoleonic getups, the banquet tablecloths and the candelabra’s flaming tapers. —Apollinaire Scherr