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Carlos Acosta devises a programme of Ballets Russes highlights to celebrate Serge Diaghilev and to showcase the young dancers of Birmingham Royal Ballet’s junior company, BRB2. 

Burlesque ballet - a wonderful mix of serious, comical, pastiche mixed with envy, self-doubt, rivalry and a swig or two of bourbon... 

On Friday, American Ballet Theatre gave us two Shakespearean reveries, José Limón’s Moor’s Pavane and Alexei Ratmansky’s new Tempest, and the contrast served neither well. Limón’s tightly structured, minimalist meditation on the theme of jealousy in Othello was partly overshadowed by the glittering spectacle of The Tempest.

Thursday night belonged to the corps de ballet at American Ballet Theatre. With the ghost of George Balanchine watching from his customary spot in the downstage right wing at the theatre formerly known as the New York State Theater, his blissful Theme and Variations and Alexei Ratmansky’s electrifying Piano Concerto no.

The première of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was a roaring success, literally. There was such commotion among the audience that the dancers could hardly hear the music, despite the determined effort of conductor Pierre Monteaux to keep going.

The Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova is a true legend in the world of classical ballet. Her dramatic interpretations plumbed deep into the human soul and revealed its full gamut of emotion and poetic beauty.

As the sun dipped below the horizon Sunday afternoon, The Chopin Society UK enticed classical music enthusiasts inside Westminster Cathedral Hall with a glittering performance by Italian pianist Alessandro Taverna. Presenting Chopin, Liszt, De Falla, Satie and Stravinsky all in one programme, Taverna re-imagined his piano recital as a ballet: Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.