-For most of my life I lived behind a curtain - not the magic one of theatre, but Stalin's Iron Curtain between the East and the West. However, it was full of holes.- So writes Michael Meylac, whose love of ballet began in his youth in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), when as a boy, his parents would take him to the famed Mariinsky and Maly Theatres in their neighborhood to see the popular post-war Russian stars and the exciting productions of the Russian ballet companies of the time. He maintained his connection to the international art form when he moved to Paris as a young...