Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina seems like a natural for the ballet stage. The 2012 movie, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley as the doomed Anna, was an extremely stylized, even choreographic, vision of the novel, and made a strong case for translating it into classical dance, despite the fact that two ballet versions of recent memory—one by Boris Eifman, the other by Alexei Ratmansky—were thin and repetitive. In 2019, however, the increasingly in-demand choreographer Yuri Possokhov created a well-received, world-premiere Anna Karenina for the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. The ballet now comes to Australia. Remember, it is a ball that seals the fate of Anna. —L.J.