It takes a certain madness to start a ballet company, even when ballet is a known quantity. So imagine when it meant nearly nothing to anybody, outside of France and Russia. Among those intrepid 20th century founders—mostly women and foreign to wherever they set up their ballet tent—was Ludmilla Chiriaeff. A W.W. II refugee from Berlin, she landed in Quebec in the early 1950s to establish the province’s first serious ballet school and troupe, eventually training generations of choreographers and teachers, who spread out across Canada to form their own companies and schools. For her centenary (she died in 1996, at age 82), that first troupe, Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets, presents Ludmilla, a mixed bill of works by choreographers who influenced Chiriaeff or whom she influenced: Balanchine (the grand influencer) and Canadians James Kudelka; Ginette Laurin, founder of Montreal’s full-throttled modern dance troupe O Vertigo; and Jean Grand-Maître, long of the Alberta Ballet, with a pièce d’occasion for the students of her school, the art’s future. —Apollinaire Scherr