George Balanchine’s witty and radiant A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962) was the first completely original full-length ballet that he made for the New York City Ballet. It is beloved, not least for its sets by David Hays and costumes by Karinska, which bring a shimmer of Botticelli, a frisson of fairy wings. Balanchine loved the music by Mendelssohn, and he loved the poetics in Shakespeare’s play, especially Bottom’s attempt to describe his experience as an ass, a spell he thinks was a dream: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.” Such synesthesia, a phenomenon in which the senses are crossed, is not unlike a ballet, or as the writer Jonathan Cott said to Balanchine, “So the inexplicability of dance is similar to Bottom’s vision.” Balanchine replied, “Absolutely.” His Midsummer tells the story impeccably, but with glorious humanity. And in Act Two, where everyone pairs up for marriage, the Divertissement pas de deux has no match for tenderness. An embodiment of love, it is “super hushed and intimate,” says the ballerina Tiler Peck. “You almost feel like you’re at church.” —Laura Jacobs