Ballet reviews do not often stir up controversy, so the headline “Gang Rapes in Ballets? No, Thanks,” on page one of The New York Times arts section, got attention. That was in 2017, long after contemporary ballet’s manhandling of ballerinas in the name of the pas de deux needed to be called out. If the 19th century put the ballerina on a pedestal—and pivoted her 360 degrees so we could admire her every angle—postmodern ballet has let her partner play puppetmeister (hoisting her from the scruff of her neck, splaying her legs like a gynecologist) and expected us to find it sexy. Hence,it wasn’t the headline that shocked somuch as the ballet that occasioned it: Odesa, by the most humane of choreographers. Alexei Ratmansky has always granted the ballerina a wide circumference of movement free of male interference. Now this controversial ballet inspired by Isaac Babel’s stories of Jewish lowlife on the Black Sea is back. I think it’s worth a second look. And while you’re at it, you can catch principal dancer Tiler Peck’s first work for the company she has helped glorify these last two decades. Come for the old scandal, stay for the new promise. —Apollinaire Scherr