They’re calling Black Swan BS on some of the dance websites, and while they’re right about the dancing, this is a whale of an enjoyable outing to the flicks: lush, Gothic, psycho and flavoursomely OTT. I don’t much care that Natalie Portman can’t dance for toffee - Tobey Maguire probably didn’t satisfy jockeys with his style in Seabiscuit, or Hilary Swank the boxing clubs in Million Dollar Baby. It’s down to the character study, and who wants well-balanced yoghurt-eaters at a ballet movie anyway?

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.

English National Ballet's 2011 season listings pivot largely on the populist Strictly Gershwin dansical before returning to The Nutcracker for next Christmas. In between there are two intriguing programmes given brief but welcome London viewings, highlighting two French masters almost never shown in the UK, Roland Petit and Serge Lifar. Both were young radicals in their time, Lifar as Diaghilev's star who went on to lead Paris Opera Ballet, and Petit, the post-war rebel who oozed French chic, sexuality and modern style in his ballets.

I was taken to task by a commenter this year who told me I should go and review music, if I couldn't enjoy dance. Hm. One takes such things to heart, but it's humbug. While piling up memories over 25 years might mean that the noise in my memory is getting more and more obtrusive, that doesn't mean you can't suddenly find the corker one night that wipes the field clean and places a new memory there which will move your yardstick yet again.

A display of rarely seen photographs of key ballet dancers from the start of the 20th century goes on display at the National Portrait Gallery. The gallery holds the largest surviving archive of the once-fashionable Bassano Studio, London, including portraits of Anna Pavlova and the great classical dancers Adeline Genée (6), Phyllis Bedells (main) and Ninette de Valois (2), founder of the Royal Ballet.

The lighting chief holds the success of a magical fairy-tale staging in his hands. Whatever the designer has done, however fantastical and virtuosic his visions, the lighting chief can ruin it. So it is with English National Ballet’s new Nutcracker, in which two gigantic miscalculations kill any of its old-fashioned atmosphere. Act One is hobbled by a gauze dropped over the front of the stage for half of it; Act Two is sabotaged by ultra-violet lighting like a morgue fridge in a horror movie.

Fairy-tale ballets are a bitch. We all grow a mental image of what is “right” when we are about five, and then woe betide anyone whose vision is different – because of course it isn’t different, it’s “wrong”. So David Bintley and his designer, John Macfarlane, are up against audiences chock-full of preconceived notions. And I’m happy to say, after BRB’s premiere of their new Christmas show last night, they passed my inner-five-year-old test with flying colours.

It is rare that you read a book, and mentally shout “Yes! Yes!” as you tick off all the things you agree with, but had never actually verbalised. It is even rarer to read a book where, in a subject you know pretty well, on almost every page you learn at least one fascinating new thing. But Jennifer Homans’ Apollo’s Angels is that book.

Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page yesterday angrily made clear that when he leaves the company in 2012 it will be against his wishes. Last Thursday the company issued an emotionless brief statement that Page had “felt he was unable to accept” an extension to his contract, which ends after 10 years' work in 2012.