What you see in the picture is the money shot, and yes, it's a miracle that you won't fully believe, even as you watch it. But there are plenty of other belief-defying miracles in the Guangdong Acrobats’ version of Swan Lake - just don’t make the mistake of calling it a ballet, especially not in earshot of the haute-couture Mariinsky Ballet, currently up the road at Covent Garden.

All ballet companies dream of finding a genuine creative talent among their ranks, and the Royal New Zealand Ballet, visiting from the farthest end of the world ballet map, have one in Andrew Simmons. The unknown name on their triple bill on this rare visit to London shows a young mind drawn naturally to grace and understated expressiveness.

There was a macabre irony at the heart of this final concert in the CBSO’s Mahler cycle in Symphony Hall. Everything was back to front. It started with a Resurrection and ended with a death. Like the universe, it began with a bang and ended, Eliot-fashion, with a whimper. And the Resurrection wasn’t even Mahler’s (that happened last month), but Messiaen’s: his Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, a work which reduces redemption to sounding brass and crashing gongs.

The appeal of fat, foolish, good-hearted panda Po (Jack Black) as a cartoon action hero is predictably diluted in this sequel. A fully trained and socially accepted martial arts master by the original’s end, he offers Kung Fu Panda 2 less pathos and originality. It compensates with spectacular 3D set pieces, cute and ferocious animals and gentle humour finely tuned to children’s tastes.

When people talk incessantly of freedom of speech, it means they are proud to have it or desperate to have it or desperate to defend it, or a mixture of all three. In Hong Kong, where I went at the end of May for the fourth edition of ART HK, people in the art world are constantly mentioning how free their speech is or else using a symbol to prove it - Ai Weiwei, the artist now imprisoned by China for "economic crimes" (ie subversive art). By speaking of Ai and displaying his work, one might almost get the impression China was not just to the north and three decades away from total control. Outside the art fair, alongside the Hong Kong flag, flies China's.

No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what might be lads from the football team but are actually Turandot’s victims to date. Calaf is a vagrant, Turandot a blue-suited Rosa Klebb, Ping, Pang and Pong fascisti bureaucrats in coloured suits, the “Popolo di Pekino” (both sexes) shirted and tied office workers, and so forth. Perfumes of the East? Forget it.

As The Observer once put it, an abiding theme of Adam Curtis's documentaries "has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts". This neatly sums up the essence of Curtis's new three-part series - though it looks like being more tragic than comic - which began with a daring parabolic narrative which soared from the monomaniac philosophies of Ayn Rand across California's Silicon Valley to the Clinton White House and Alan Greenspan's basilisk-like reign on Wall Street.

There must be at least 100 more interesting pianists in the concert world than Lang Lang, but perhaps he is just the best publicist around, because nothing else can explain why such a vacuous display as he gave last night at the Royal Festival Hall could bring a standing ovation. Most of the evening felt like being on a plushly cushioned chintz sofa with Tinkerbell, listening to Bach, Schubert and Chopin being served as a cream tea. Lang Lang Inspires is the slogan at the Southbank Centre all this week, but what is inspiring? His art - or just his vast skills as a public communicator, with 40 million Chinese piano students now credited to the Lang Lang effect?

It is now 37 days since Ai Weiwei was detained at Beijing international airport by the Chinese authorities. His family and friends have heard nothing since. His lawyer, to whom under Chinese law he must have access, was arrested as well, and since his own release he too has heard nothing. Officially, unless charges are brought today, the period in which he can be held without charge expires. And yet, where is Ai Weiwei? The whereabouts of Ai Weiwei the man are unknown. In London, however, Ai Weiwei the artist makes two stellar appearances.

In the ravages of the recent arts cuts, and debates over the winners and losers, one estimable organisation tended to be overlooked in the coverage – the Asian Music Circuit, who have done more for Asian arts in the UK than probably any other entity. They have had their entire grant cut. The director of AMC, Viram Jasani, told me he was stunned by this unexpected savagery and took a week or two to gather his thoughts and mount a campaign. Sections of the media have started to swing behind it – in the last week an editorial in The Guardian simply said: “This is madness.”