The Royal Opera House is on fire this month. Not literally (unless someone knocks over the flaming braziers outside) but with the varied illuminations of the Deloitte Ignite Festival, co-curated by the Royal Ballet and Minna Moore Ede of the National Gallery. The theme this year is Myth, and specifically Leda's rape by Zeus in swan form, and Prometheus's gift of fire to humanity.

For a dance company, the always delicate balance between preserving your heritage and creating an exciting future becomes especially hard to negotiate when you are the most venerable institution in your field. The Mariinsky Ballet, now on tour in London, have this problem magnified by a general perception (theirs and the public’s) that they are the world’s keepers of the great Russian ballet tradition, which they are expected to represent at its finest.

One of the reasons I always tell ballet sceptics to give Romeo and Juliet a go is that any production with halfway decent lovers and a vaguely competent rendition of Prokofiev’s score should convince them that this art form isn’t just about swans and sugar plums.

For all it’s a balmy July here, the litany of appalling news from the world’s conflict zones will have left many of us feeling less than summery at heart. In that frame of mind, you might wonder whether Coppélia, English National Ballet’s latest production, is quite what you want to see. We are speaking, after all, of a frothy 19th-century comic ballet, full of charading silliness, populated by unfeasibly cheerful peasants, and ending happily with the all-too-predictable wedding. Sharp social commentary – or existential comfort – it ain’t.

La Bayadère is one of the ballets I recommend to people who have never seen ballet before. It has high drama, exquisite tragedy, fabulous costumes, one of the best "white" acts going, and it almost passes the Bechdel test. Sitting in a mostly empty Vue cinema in Harrow watching last night’s live broadcast from the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, I had a chance to try my own prescription.

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.

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.