This is the heart-wrenching time of year when dance school students give their graduation performances and professional dancers bow out at the end of their careers. How poignant to watch Paris Opéra Ballet étoile Nicolas Le Riche, alone on the vast Palais Garnier stage, bidding farewell to his fans at 42, and then to witness Royal Ballet School youngsters making their debuts en masse at the Royal Opera House.

Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project.

Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev.

No one could accuse Nederlands Danse Theater choreographers Sol Leon and Paul Lightfoot for thinking inside of the box. And yet that's exactly where they've placed their dancers in the opening piece, Sehnsucht, of this impressive Sadler's Wells program.

There are all sorts of companies and shows out there that claim to “rock” the ballet, or otherwise shake up, take down or reinvent an art form that, they imply, is (breathe it softly, the dirty word) elitist, or at least irrelevant. Few, I’d imagine, perform this operation with anything like the skill and intelligence of Dada Masilo, whose 2010 version of Swan Lake opened the lively short smorgasbord season that Sadler’s Wells are calling their Sampled festival. 

What a difference a change of cast can make to a show. On Wednesday night I saw Tamara Rojo and Carlos Acosta as the titular lovers in English National Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall (see below for that review). Last night it was the turn of ENB’s other Royal Ballet emigrée, Alina Cojocaru, and guest star Friedemann Vogel of Stuttgart Ballet.

“The touch is light. We like it so,” wrote Ninette de Valois in one of her later poems. You didn’t know the founder of the Royal Ballet wrote poetry? Don’t worry, you’re not missing much – except the occasional phrase which can serve as an epigraph for early English ballet.

The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.

It's always a bit of a thrill descending to the Linbury Studio Theatre in the Royal Opera House. A black box deep buried in the ground, it feels far away from all the glamour and glitter, but also the prices and pressure, of the main stage, plus the Linbury's steeply raked stalls bring the audience amazingly - excitingly - close to the dancers.

“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage.