Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so.

Great ballet dancers who boldly turn away from a stellar international career to grow a national ballet company in their homelands are few, but legendary. Alicia Alonso did it in Cuba, Ninette de Valois did it in Britain. And, dancing across the cusp of even more perilous political weather than either, so did the brilliant Bolshoi Ballet star Nina Ananiashvili when 20 years ago she left the world stage to return to her broken and battered native Georgia and generate its own classical ballet company. 

To the international world of ballet, Clement Crisp was the British critic to fear for half a century. Crisp's dance reviews for the Financial Times – "the pink 'un" – from 1970 until 2020 were legendary for their passionate fastidiousness about ballerinas and high style, their acuity about rising talents and the difficulties of creativity, and – often – their ferocity, when he saw something he thought a blight.

Russia came late to the coronavirus lockdown, and will be leaving early – this evening Vladimir Putin announced that national measures were coming to an end, though the disease still rages there.

Why is Alexei Ratmansky one of the greatest living choreographers of classical ballet? Well partly because, as last night's performance of The Bright Stream by the Bolshoi at the Royal Opera House proved, he can do comedy.

The Bolshoi juggernaut has rolled into town and will be dominating the thoughts of ballet fans in and around the capital for the next three weeks. And what could be more dominating - or more quintessentially Bolshoi - than Yuri Grigorovitch's 1968 Spartacus?

With forelock-tugging celebrations of a choreographer who died 25 years ago and a summer visit by the Mariinsky the highest-profile events in the calendar, 2017 may not be remembered as a vintage year for British dance.

Nureyev, the most notorious new production at the Bolshoi Ballet’s modern history, premiered last night in Moscow to a 15-minute standing ovation and exclamations of official approval even by Putin’s press secretary – but the ballet’s creator and director languished under house arrest, refused permission to see his own ball

Just as the 200th anniversary is about to be celebrated of the great genius of 19th-century classical ballets, Marius Petipa, the creator of The Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, La Bayadère, half of Swan Lake, and many other masterpieces, his oeuvre's most remarkable reconstructor has died suddenly, aged only 55.

The Flames of Paris, in Alexei Ratmansky's 2008 reworking, is a ballet of contrasts. Between the first and second acts, so different in pace and quality, between the naturalistic intimacy of certain pas de deux and the stylised posturing of the crowd scenes, between the tedious masque in Act I and the fireworks show-off variations in Act II, between the liquid velvet blood-red curtains and the flat black-and-white line drawing sets.