Sometimes lost amid critical appraisals of opera is the art form’s movement quotient, which involves both set-piece ballets and the ways that directors and singers use movement to interpret character and situation. It was de rigueur in most 19thcentury grand operas for at least one, and frequently multiple ballets to be interpolated into the evening’s pageantry. Today these ballets are often considered gratuitous and cut, but a case can be made that they have a vital role to play in the operas for which they were composed.

On Wednesday night, mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina sang her first Delilah of the Metropolitan Opera season in Saint-Saens’s “Samson et Dalila.” Earlier this month, she performed Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Met. In both operas, Ms. Borodina used her movement to incise character and emotion.

As Delilah, Ms. Borodina was skillfully integrated by choreographer Graeme Murphy into the Act I ballet. She made her entrance amid a swaying, serpentine processional of hand maidens, who emerged from a field dense with fertility. Therein ensued a wafting little dance by her handmaidens – most of them professional dancers – in which Ms. Borodina’s Delilah participated in their runs and poses, redolent with the eroticism of a strophe by Sappho.

More conventional was the Act III bacchanal of “Samson,” performed by the Metropolitan’s resident ballet troupe. This might be called the “Dance of the Buttocks,” by virtue of the panoply of posteriors visible in the exiguous costumes. The partnering work included a certain amount of dry humping as well as hyperventilated dives and catches. The dancers seemed to be having a rip-roaring old time, and the audience also enjoyed itself heartily.

Ms. Borodina is very tall and amply built without being cumbersome. She is remarkably effective at dominating the stage by assuming a monumental pose and growing roots under it. For the first three acts of “Aida,” Ms. Borodina’s movement was rigidly prescribed by her office and her hauteur as the Egyptian princess Amneris, who is engaged to Aida’s lover, the warrior Radames. All the more effective was the way her composure was blown to bits in Act IV, when Radames is sentenced to death after he divulges state secrets to Aida. Ms. Borodina opened the act pacing frantically as she awaited the beginning of his trial. She traversed the stage in desperate runs, straining to overhear the judicial proceedings, sinking onto a bench, her regal composure now crumpled by remorse at her role in delivering the perfidious Radames to his captors.

Ballet in opera is usually relegated to a few situations and pretexts: marches, divertissement at a royal court, scenes of enticement, or fullscale bacchanals. In “Aida,” Act II, Scene 1, Amneris readies herself for the upcoming celebration of Egypt’s triumph. Three child-like performers are admitted to Amneris’s boudoir, whispering excitedly; we might assume that this may be their first performance before the princess.

Both ballets in the Met’s “Aida” are choreographed by Rodney Griffin. Under his direction, solo dancers Christine McMillan, Desiree Sanchez Meineck, and Armando Braswell executed this fetching dance of interlocked positions in Act II,Scene 1.In the following scene, the Met’s ballet troupe performed with gusto the full-scale, acrobatic display at the triumphal procession.

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In this country, the standard of ballet in opera has always been considered, usually accurately, as less than firstrate.The opera ballets in European and Russian state theaters, on the other hand, benefit by the presence of resident ballets troupes that function in tandem and often in parity with the opera. At St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky’s Theater, for example, it was the custom for decades that the Polonaise in Glinka’s “A Life for the Czar,” or the Walpurgisnacht revels in Gounod’s “Faust,” be led by some of the century’s greatest ballerinas.

The ballet that Mikhail Fokine choreographed for a 1917 staging of Glinka’s “Ruslan and Ludmilla” at the Mariinsky endures today in the Kirov Opera production. It is one of the best of Fokine’s surviving ballets; two years ago I watched it performed beautifully by Kirov Ballet performers during a matinee of the opera in St. Petersburg. The ballet is the central episode of an entire act replete with movement, as a tribe of enchanted maidens attempts to deflect one of the opera’s competing knights from completing his mission to rescue Ludmilla.

Wagner’s “Parsifal,” composed 30 years after “Ruslan,” contains a similar episode of enticement. On Tuesday night, I was in Washington to hear – and see – Valery Gergiev lead the Kirov Opera in an incandescent “Parsifal” at the Kennedy Center.

In Act II, the flower maidens surround Parsifal and soften him up for Kundy’s attempt to corrupt him by erotic complicity. The Kirov’s flower maidens were slim, comely, and sang beautifully.

There’s not enough time in the score nor sufficient rhythmic propulsion to do anything like a full-scale ballet here, but the flower maidens disport themselves in circular chains and tableaux that suggested the Dalcroze movement exercises that were in vogue at the time that “Parsifal” was composed. Here again, as with Ms. Borodina’s participation in the Act I seduction idyll of “Samson,” nondancers were able to suggest the fluency and freedom of choreographed movement.