Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue, and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it. A well-known backstage anecdote concerns the occasion when the prima ballerina found ground glass in her toe slipper — and every other dancer in the Company was equally suspect.

Nutcracker: Money, Madness, Murder: A Family Album (1985)