The Mrs. and I took in the Joffrey Ballet's Winter program yesterday afternoon at the venerable Auditorium Theatre. Two pieces stood out for me. The first was "Mobile," a short work choreographed by Tomm Ruud for three dancers. The Chicago Tribune review described it as "a brief and somewhat negligible piece," but I found it mesmerising. Based on an Alexander Calder mobile, the work has three bodies hook and pivot slowly around one another, simultaneously obeying and defying gravity.

The second stand-out work was a restaging of the Joffrey's recreation of Nijinsky's 1914 masterpiece, The Rites of Spring (this being The Ballet, of course, they used the Francophone title: Le Sacre du Printemps). I'd seen this in a PBS television special when it was first mounted back in the late 1980s, but as is always the case the live experience was infinitely more thrilling. Those pounding feet and dervish-like spins still have the power to astonish, although no actual rioting broke out yesterday.

A couple of other revivals to note here: my colleague Norma Field has a useful article in this week's Japan Focus on the background and future prospects of the unlikely popular rediscovery in 2008 Japan of Kobayashi Takiji's 1928 proletarian literature classic, The Cannery Boat.

Secondly, the last fifteen years or so has seen a rewarding revival of creative film production in Japan. The rest of the world seems finally to be taking notice. When we got home last night we turned on the NHK news: the top story informed us that Kato Kunio's "Le Maison en Petits Cubes" (note to self: really must brush up on my French) had just taken the Best Animated Short award. The biggest news of the evening was yet to come, of course: about an hour later, Takita Yojiro's Okuribito (The Departed) won the Best Foreign Language Film award, first time ever in that category for a Japanese film (a couple of films had previously won special Oscars). I have yet to see this one, but there's a trailer available here.