English National Ballet has dipped into its back catalogue for a popular attraction with half-term family appeal — Derek Deane’s Alice in Wonderland. This colourful production, first staged in 1995, is revived for the autumn tour for the first time in six years. Apart from the perennial pleasure of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, the other enticement here is music by Tchaikovsky. Not that he wrote such a ballet, of course, though an enthusiastic programme note suggests he should have done. This is an effective compilation by Carl Davis from symphonies, the Album for the Young, orchestral suites and more, which keeps the action going — mostly — with a strong performance from ENB’s orchestra under Martin West.

Deane has always been a fluent and efficient classical choreo- grapher. Although he stood down as artistic director five years ago, ENB has good reason — financial in recent cash-strapped years — to rely on his big box-office ballets. Alice isn’t in the same bracket as Deane’s Swan Lake. His classical set pieces — such as the Garden of Living Flowers (Petipa-style), the Hearts corps de ballet in delightful square tutus (Balanchinean) and a romantic pas de deux for the Dream Alice and the Knave of Hearts (elegantly done by Daria Klimentova and Dmitri Gruzdyev in the first cast, amid a surfeit of dry ice) — are bright and attractive. Yet they quickly yield in memory to the ingenuity of the staging — with its clever illusions by Paul Kieve — and imaginative designs by Sue Blane, based on Tenniel’s illustrations.

Maria Kochetkova is a charming and spirited Alice. Yat-Sen Chang’s fussy White Rabbit is in almost constant motion, jigging and jumping with brilliant footwork. James Streeter’s malicious Duchess is fun; Sarah McIlroy’s Queen of Hearts has a dash of Giselle’s Queen of the Wilis; Francisco Bosch’s slithery, hookah- smoking Caterpillar is drugged up to his rolling eyeballs; and Gruzdyev combines technical polish with the looks and comic manner of Hugh Laurie in Black- adder. So there’s plenty of entertainment, and, with so many episodes and characters to fit in, a lot of less-effective fuss. Performances are enthusiastic. I have heard a whisper the dancers don’t care for this ballet. You wouldn’t guess it — they’re professionals.

Dance Umbrella’s focus on the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker continued at Sadler’s Wells with her Rosas company in a retrospective of three works from the 1980s and 1990s.

I found the tramping through — or trampling on — classical music cumulatively resistible. Four women in “signature” black dresses, boots and much-flashed white pants sashay, stamp and galumph in Quatuor No 4, to Bartok (often irritatingly interrupted for similar activity in silence); while Die Grosse Fuge (Beet-hoven) is a hectic barrage of drop and roll, jump and scud — energetic, certainly, except when the dancers retire for an arbitrary moment while the Duke Quartet play on. Verklärte Nacht (Schoen- berg) is different in that it boasts an atmospheric moonlit decor of trees and a leaf-strewn stage, and essays an emotional content — albeit abstruse. There are as many comings and goings in this forest as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — but little to grasp in the many couplings except angst.

At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, from New York, the Stephen Petronio Company’s latest Umbrella showing, a triple bill, revealed his eight dancers in fine form. It is a matter of taste whether you find his strenuous, spearing style consistently exciting or too samey and relentless. Lareigne (from 1995) sets the scene and pace — a tricksy maelstrom of kicks, jumps and lunges (the men in corsets) to thumpy music by David Linton.

The other two pieces, both made this year, are set to music by Rufus Wainwright. Bud Suite has quirky costumes and skitter-stagger movement, but also a quartet and two contrasted duets, with the import of a love affair. Bloom, with the delightful humming of two local schools choirs, is new Wainwright, setting Lux Aeterna (Latin Mass) and verses of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. I didn’t discern the relevance to the hyperactive movement — a vocabulary with which I left feeling overfamiliar.