Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in Singin’ in the Rain, or Laurey’s dream in Oklahoma!, whose first interpreter was its choreographer Agnes de Mille.

It’s hard to think of anyone even half as persistent as William Forsythe in changing the conversation around ballet. The American choreographer first came to notice with what became the defining dancework of the late 1980s.

Who goes to the theatre to feel sad? That is, knowing full well that they won’t be going home with a skip in their step. Many people, it would appear, given the success of a small touring dance show based on a book by the poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen.

Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer who has helped keep the choreographer’s legacy intact since his death in 1983 and a living link with his teaching. Neary has been working with the RB as a coach, advisor and stager of Balanchine’s work for the past 57 years. “Oh yes!” was her emphatic answer.

1965 was a year of change in Britain. It saw the abolition of the death penalty and the arrival of the Race Relations Act. It was the year of the Mary Quant miniskirt and “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. While cinema-goers queued around the block to see The Sound of Music (a critical flop), the Royal Opera House had another kind of hit on its hands.

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene.

Many of our readers today may have forgotten the arts journalism atmosphere of the first decade of the new century – especially the decimation of traditional broadsheet arts coverage that followed the financial crisis of 2008.

“Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail”. The refrain of Aeschylus’s chorus near the start of the Oresteia is alive and honoured in Henryk Górecki’s rhetoric-free symphonic memorial and Crystal Pite’s response to the dynamism under its seemingly static surface. 44 dancers of all ages, soprano, orchestra and design all work towards a timeless work of art, resonating now but bound to hold up in whatever future remains to us.

Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.

Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.