Carlos Acosta is that rare 21st-century phenomenon – a performer who has become a household name without the help of reality TV. Even people who run a mile from ballet know the story of the Havana slum boy made good through perseverance and pure talent, from countless primetime documentaries as well as a self-penned book and stage show. The Royal Ballet cannot have imagined how things would turn out when it signed its first (and, to date, only) black principal 17 years ago.

The great Bolshoi ballerina Ludmila Semenyaka once told me that you need the claws of a tiger and the hide of a rhinoceros to survive at Moscow's iconic theatre. Her bitter words came to mind yesterday morning when I saw the Twitter feed of the Bolshoi Theatre blithely congratulating the ballet artistic director Sergei Filin on his 45th birthday – along with a photo of him from before the acid attack that ruined his youthful looks, his eyesight and his career as a ballet director.

For an art form with a marked penchant for looking over its shoulder, it’s surprising how rarely ballet has exploited its own origins story – not least given the fabled opulence and style of its leading character. The Sleeping Beauty makes a nod to Louis XIV and the court of Versailles in its final moments, but in most ballet goers’ mental archive that’s just about it.

Swan Lakes are not created equal. In fact they are not even created the same: ballet is the art form with the evanescent repertoire, in which First Folios – or any folios – are singularly scarce. Even with a classic as beloved as Swan Lake, there is no stable text apart from Ivanov's lakeside choreography for Act II and Tchaikovsky's score (though not even all of that).

Wayne McGregor wasn't anyone's idea of a ballet man when he was appointed choreographer in residence at the Royal Ballet in 2007. Before then, and since, his work has been abstract, spiky, verging on dysmorphic. His interest lay not in human stories but in the snap of synapses and the speed with which the brain can relay messages to a hyper-flexible body.

If the Trocks didn't exist, we would have to invent them. Every genre needs its loving parodists, treading the fine line between homage and dommage, and an art form as stylised and convention-governed as classical dance is riper for it than most - as evidenced by the continuing worldwide success of this all-male comedy troupe after more than 40 years.

If you don’t know the steps or the stars being semi-spoofed, will you laugh? Yes, though perhaps not as much as anticipated. The best parody needs to be as good as the original, and “the Trocks”, as Tory Dobrin's New York-based company has been known in its 40-plus years to date, take their Petipa and Ivanov very seriously. The drag gags are mere ornaments to a classical feast, and don’t fly into the fantastical like some of the ones you get in any Matthew Bourne show; the real reward is some remarkable dancing.

Someone more unlike Louis XIV than David Bintley is hard to imagine. The latter comes across on TV as the most pleasant, unthreatening, mild-mannered of Everymen; unthinkable that he would order the massacre of Protestants or proclaim, “l’État, c’est moi.” Yet the quiet poise with which he glides down the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles at the beginning of The King Who Invented Ballet reveals what Bintley has in common with the legendary absolute monarch: he’s a classically trained ballet dancer.

When English National Ballet premiered Lest We Forget in April last year, to enthusiastic reviews, they were ahead of the pack with First World War commemoration, and the ambitious modern programme was the first sign of Tamara Rojo's determination to make the company's repertoire more contemporary. But in the intervening 18 months there have been war-themed ballet programmes aplenty, and we have all got used to the sense of dynamism that swirls around ENB under Rojo's leadership.

The occupation “lighting designer” is too workaday to describe Michael Hulls. The artistry with which he casts illumination or shadow on some of the great dancers of our time make the idea of switches and bulb wattage seem humdrum. Pellucid, occluded, darkling - this is Hulls’ palette of twilight effects. Too often, he says, people do not understand the difference between seeing the dancer and seeing the dance.