Rudy and Margot do intensely serious barre in an Italian garden, Lynn Seymour enjoys a "Loyal Ballet" poster on a 1962 Japanese tour, in Glasgow two ballet girls snatch some rest in uncomfortable chairs. The real world of ballet, as shot by the insider who became a world photographer, Colin Jones. Read the interview with him, describing the friendships and tragic dramas behind the exhibition of 50 years of his ballet pictures at Proud Chelsea Gallery - events as turbulent as anything onstage.

The chasm between the top-class ballet available to London-area ballet-goers and the low-grade stuff peddled in the regions is the field where the battle to save ballet’s soul is nightly won or lost. Nothing could be more dispiriting than to see the Russian State Ballet of Siberia’s Swan Lake in Oxford one night, and the Royal Ballet’s Giselle in London the next, knowing that for many unaware Brits without easy access to the capital, Birmingham or Edinburgh the phrase “Russian ballet” implies some shamanic edict of unchallenged natural superiority. Far from it.

Christmas rolls around, and so does Cinderella, a welcome alternative to the seasonal dance-critic bah-humbug that is The Nutcracker. First, the good news. The good news is Marianela Nuñez. Always a lovely dancer, in Ashton she just glows. No one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s fiendishly difficult petite batterie, those tiny, beaten, viciously fast steps; no one could be more suited than she to Ashton’s light, bright jumps: with her sunny temperament and lovely punchy ballon Nuñez rises (literally) to the choreography’s demands.

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.

The ballet world knows uniquely well how to stage gracious gestures to one of its own - dance history is close-knit and last night the Royal Ballet’s first mixed bill of the season turned into a surprising celebration of the Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso in her 90th year. Even more of a stunner to see Alonso herself sitting in the Royal Box, and coming on stage at the end to a standing ovation, tiny, chalk-white, red-lipped, with black glasses over her blind eyes, giving a remarkably deep curtsey for someone of 89.

Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.

One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg in the central roles last night for the Royal Ballet's opening salvo of the season, there wasn’t a hair's-breadth spare in the house, every place gone, even the standing ones in the gods where you can only see a sliver of the stage.

In the first of a short summer series in which artists and performers tell theartsdesk about what they're reading, ballerina Tamara Rojo talks about the books she's taken with her on holiday, and what she's enjoyed reading. We run short extracts from two of them.

Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds some dancers, finds some music, finds some moves, finds some light and atmosphere - and this agglomeration of variables goes out on stage all too often to fall flat, a soufflé that didn't rise. It was insufficiently skilled, or its ingredients were stale, or it lacked the leavening of a compelling imagination or the flavour of real emotional imperative. But what is going on?

The annual tradition that is the Royal Ballet School Matinee at Covent Garden isn’t just some prestige indulgence for the nervous parents of ballet children fortunate enough to survive the militaristic training and dogged enough to want to continue into the beckoning career where there are such frail job prospects. It is a place where the gap between a good student and a potential artist comes clear through the sheer size and one-offness of the occasion.