Dance: Little Juggernaut

On her biggest night ever, before the most expensive audience in all Manhattan, she slipped—and very nearly fell on her face. Hardly anybody minded. For by that time, Natalia Makarova had demonstrated that she has that heart-stopping quality of a great dancer. As the doomed girl in Giselle, she had just executed a series of dazzling turns and was subsiding into a curtsy—the simplest of maneuvers. It was like a man who had scaled Mount Everest slipping in his shower.

For the rest of the evening Makarova was immaculate. In the role of the...