English National Ballet's 2011 season listings pivot largely on the populist Strictly Gershwin dansical before returning to The Nutcracker for next Christmas. In between there are two intriguing programmes given brief but welcome London viewings, highlighting two French masters almost never shown in the UK, Roland Petit and Serge Lifar. Both were young radicals in their time, Lifar as Diaghilev's star who went on to lead Paris Opera Ballet, and Petit, the post-war rebel who oozed French chic, sexuality and modern style in his ballets.

I was taken to task by a commenter this year who told me I should go and review music, if I couldn't enjoy dance. Hm. One takes such things to heart, but it's humbug. While piling up memories over 25 years might mean that the noise in my memory is getting more and more obtrusive, that doesn't mean you can't suddenly find the corker one night that wipes the field clean and places a new memory there which will move your yardstick yet again.

A display of rarely seen photographs of key ballet dancers from the start of the 20th century goes on display at the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery holds the largest surviving archive of the once-fashionable Bassano Studio, London, including portraits of Anna Pavlova and the great classical dancers Adeline Genée (6), Phyllis Bedells (main) and Ninette de Valois (2), founder of the Royal Ballet.

The lighting chief holds the success of a magical fairy-tale staging in his hands. Whatever the designer has done, however fantastical and virtuosic his visions, the lighting chief can ruin it. So it is with English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker, in which two gigantic miscalculations kill any of its old-fashioned atmosphere. Act One is hobbled by a gauze dropped over the front of the stage for half of it; Act Two is sabotaged by ultra-violet lighting like a morgue fridge in a horror movie.

Fairy-tale ballets are a bitch. We all grow a mental image of what is “right” when we are about five, and then woe betide anyone whose vision is different – because of course it isn’t different, it’s “wrong”. So David Bintley and his designer, John Macfarlane, are up against audiences chock-full of preconceived notions. And I’m happy to say, after BRB’s premiere of their new Christmas show last night, they passed my inner-five-year-old test with flying colours.

It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.

Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page yesterday angrily made clear that when he leaves the company in 2012 it will be against his wishes. Last Thursday the company issued an emotionless brief statement that Page had “felt he was unable to accept” an extension to his contract, which ends after 10 years' work in 2012.

Places, please, deliciousness, please. This is Delibes, a man whose music goes with delectable disbelief, and this is that zany thing, a Fifties nymph ballet, so let us sip hallucinogenic Arcadian cocktails and leave normality at the cloakroom. But the sheer prettiness of Léo Delibes's ballets (La Source, Coppélia, Sylvia) is too much for most dancemakers to digest. Even a choreographer so oozing charm as Frederick Ashton made no classic with his 1952 staging of Sylvia. Last night, given the bumbling performance by the Royal Ballet after a few years’ absence, it came over even more as a ballet best to have on iPod.

“Rudolf thought, what you wanted out of life you had to get straightaway, because if you thought about it too long, you might be dead,” said the ballerina Patricia Ruanne, the first Juliet in Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Romeo and Juliet. Coming a dozen years after Kenneth MacMillan’s landmark Royal Ballet version, Nureyev’s - for London Festival Ballet - is regrettably eclipsed, for what a powerful piece of theatre it is, and this autumn the chance to see both versions side by side has underscored that even if Nureyev was not the greatest choreographer, this was a story about individuals swamped in politics - something he knew about, from experience.

They keep on coming, these screen-to-stage musical adaptations, noisy, bombastic, as unsubtle as juggernauts. The best of them offer up their uncomplicated entertainment with some pizazz; but Flashdance is a particularly vacuous example of the genre. You probably had to be female, and teetering on the edge of your teens, to enjoy Adrian Lyne’s critically derided film back in 1983 (I freely admit that I was, and I did): Tom Hedley and Joe Eszterhas’s screenplay is both shapeless and pointless. This new version, written by Hedley and Robert Cary and directed by Nikolai Foster, does nothing to improve upon it.