Calendars for the coming ballet season have now been announced across much of America. As usual, story ballets abound. But what stories do they tell? Narrative ballet remains a heritage park: an Old World never-never land. How many of us would actually like to inhabit those onstage worlds? Which choreographers are telling stories for our time?

As we anticipate the coming months, it’s useful to ask these questions, especially as they relate to issues of racial, ethnic and national stereotyping in story ballet. The ranks of ballet companies contain dancers of varied backgrounds; race-blind casting and interracial partnerships have been widespread for decades. Yet clichéd and sometimes offensive views of race remain alive and well across the art form. Several of the old ballets and a few of the new ones give us national and racial stereotypes that would be unshowable in a play or a movie. And yet they draw audiences.

This year the Bolshoi Ballet transmitted live broadcasts of two 19th-century ballets featuring caricature-type depictions of people from the Middle East: “Raymonda” and “Le Corsaire.” The title heroine of “Raymonda” has two suitors; the unsuccessful one is Abderakhman, a Saracen. It’s likely that in the 1898 original (recently reconstructed for La Scala Ballet in Milan) this character was conceived as dangerously seductive — the composer, Alexander Glazunov, gave him wonderfully sensuous music — only proving villainous later when he is rejected. But the Bolshoi’s production, changing the scenario, presents him primarily as a villain (the heroine first meets him in her nightmare) and strongly implies that of course he’s a villain because he’s a Saracen.