In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.

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.

It's always a bit of a thrill descending to the Linbury Studio Theatre in the Royal Opera House. A black box deep buried in the ground, it feels far away from all the glamour and glitter, but also the prices and pressure, of the main stage, plus the Linbury's steeply raked stalls bring the audience amazingly - excitingly - close to the dancers.

“We want to be the most creative and the most loved ballet company in this country,” Tamara Rojo told the audience in the Barbican Pit last night. “We want you to love us.” The director of English National Ballet knows a thing or two about gaining the love of audiences, something she has excelled at in her own dancing career, but it has been nothing short of jaw-dropping, over the 18 months she has been at ENB, to watch how skilfully she can work the same magic on a far larger stage.

Sure as carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the 2010s are following a standard 20-year nostalgia cycle by embracing the 1990s as their "retro twin" decade. The quiet rumblings of the last few years – student Nineties parties and the reappearance of the crop top – have this year flowered into a full-on revival that has hairdressers fingering their razors (remember the Rachel cut?), thirty-somethings wearing double denim again, and Rambert coming to Sadler’s Wells with revivals from 1990-1 alongside a Merce Cunningham classic from the Nineties’ own retro twin decade, the 1970s.

Getting pubes in your teeth during sex is one thing. Rabbit fur is something else. The moment when Ben Duke removes a wisp of partner Ino Riga’s costume from his mouth following a particularly lusty tussle may not be planned. But it’s in keeping with this witty dance-theatre duet created by Olivier-winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood and Lost Dog. Like Rabbits is all about the wild joy of a new relationship, the secret worlds we can access through sexual abandon, and the pressure that passion, and love, come under when reality intrudes.

Some artists acquire (or create) cults of personality because – Byron, Wagner or Van Gogh – they are just so obviously fruity. Some others, though less fruity, are venerated because their work is so tear-prickingly astonishing that we are desperate to get closer to its source. Shakespeare is one such; George Balanchine, the twentieth-century Russian-American choreographer, is another. Serenade (1934), the first piece he made in America, is a thing of wonder. Ever argued with a music-lover who thought most scores would be better without dance’s cheap, distracting visuals?

Watching The Royal Ballet’s The Winter’s Tale a few weeks ago, I was struck by the quasi-absurdity of adapting the Bard for dance - a thought numerous choreographers must have encountered while toying with the idea. The complexity of Shakespeare’s plots and characters, and the importance of his linguistic intricacy has meant that relatively few have dared to take on the task and even fewer have succeeded in creating lasting adaptations.