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.

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.

The seasonal Nuts-fest continues (and culminates) with another two to add to the roast – live: English National Ballet’s recent production, and digital: the Mariinsky Theatre’s 3D film version. To the cinema we go. This is the first 3D Nutcracker ever, following the Mariinsky’s 3D Giselle last year – and the screening of dance is a good thing, as few can afford to fly the world over to see a number of Nutcracker productions.

In 2006 an elderly dancer died in Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex. She was 88, and had once been one of Britain's most recognised ballerinas. Why did she die in obscurity? Why is the great ballet company that she ran now a forgotten name? This was what I set out to explore in a BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired yesterday. Inglesby's story has the improbability of an epic. As a very young woman she defied wartime conditions to launch a major ballet company, which introduced the British public en masse to grand ballet.

On 25 November cinemas all over Britain and overseas will host a live relay from the Bolshoi Ballet of a rampantly OTT and enormously entertaining ballet set in ancient Egypt, The Pharaoh's Daughter. It has mummies coming to life, English tourists in timewarps, frenzied cobras, underwater ballets, jaunty tunes, and phalanxes of delectable archeresses. The original ballet premiered exactly 150 years ago, and what you'll see is a recreation of the fantastical, surreal exotica of the kind of theatre provided at the dawn of classical ballet.

Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.

Matthew Bourne’s charm is a rare and cheering thing in the world of dance - a night out with three of his earliest works, Spitfire, Town & Country and The Infernal Galop, is akin to sitting down to watch Father Ted or Dad’s Army. It’s clever, often witty, always gay, and kind.

After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on tour in Britain with his Mariinsky Opera forces, and he’s conducting nothing but blockbusters. Last night, Verdi’s Requiem in London. On Good Friday, it’s the epic Parsifal again, in Birmingham. The tour finished, he’ll be back in St Petersburg by Sunday, launching the Mariinsky’s third International Piano Festival. 

Gergiev’s second Cardiff concert was thematically linked to his first. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony shares with Parsifal a certain kind of solipsistic religiosity that talks about God in the way some people talk about their ancestors. We don’t really need them any more, but they make us feel important. One approaches both works with mixed feelings (some, with actual distaste). But in the end one usually has to admit: art conquers, and God is not (altogether) mocked.