1.   But Ms. Cummings creates the sense of an almost filmic sweep of history, stuffed with fleeting suggestions of individual tales, that is unusual in dance today.

2.   In America, where even history is democratic, millions of individual tales accrete into a national saga the way notes form a song.

3.   It is, though, the individual tales of mothers like Mrs. Ching that shed light on the hopes and anxieties of mainlanders who long to live here.

4.   Still, individual tales of woe abound.

5.   The latest clinical evidence buttresses hundreds of individual tales of people bouncing back from the edge of death with the so-called triple-drug cocktails.

6.   The information recorded on the manifests hints at their individual tales of grit, adventure and hope.