In 2022, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz made a duet on Royal Ballet principals William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan, which they performed at the company’s Diamond Celebration. That piece has now evolved into a true gem.

What to expect of the National Ballet of Canada since its last London visit 11 years ago? Dance with an eco-message, a world-peace message, or more visible diversity on stage?

Nobodaddy, taking its title from Blake’s violent dark-god “Father of Jealousy”, is much more than a dance piece, and Michael Keegan-Dolan, whose company was formerly known as Fabulous Beast, is more than just a choreographer, with unique takes on the total work of art already to his credit.

In many ways Lewis Carroll’s 1865 compendium of literary nonsense is ideal material for ballet. We all like a story we can hum, even if we’re hazy on the details. And this story, with its topsy-turvy logic and anthropomorphic creatures, is stuffed with quirky detail, much of it surely never intended to go anywhere but over the heads of its original child readers.

You need to be fairly long in the tooth to feel nostalgia for the heyday of London City Ballet. The group was set up in 1978 by the late Harold King to tour a large and varied classical repertoire at home and abroad. Princess Diana, its patron, befriended the company, supporting its work both publicly and privately.

The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.

It’s exactly a year since Ballet Nights, the self-styled taster platform for dance, started offering chirpily compered evenings of ballet and contemporary at venues where you'd least expect to find them. A first anniversary is already an achievement; to have arrived there bigger and better more so.

Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet (for whom he created much of it), or elsewhere.

Success in running a large and expanding dance-house enterprise requires knowing when to play safe and when to play with fire, trusting that your audience will come with you.

If there is a more striking, more moving, more downright enjoyable way to experience Shakespeare’s second-from-last play, I have yet to see it. The Winter’s Tale, originally a “romance” in five acts, is widely regarded as a problem play, not only because of its lack of poetic blank verse or cheerful rhymed couplets, but because of its lurching narrative tone, the first three acts filled with bleak  psychological drama, the last two comic and frothy.