Swan Lake and Royal Ballet’s Ashton bill

This season sees Les Patiners and The Tales of Beatrix Potter and the latest return of Matthew Bourne's famous production

Nutcracker proves a timeless success

Scottish Ballet and the Royal Ballet give rousing, albeit very different, versions of Tchaikovsky’s miraculous music

‘Dance on TV has rejuvenated medium’

The nation’s three biggest broadcasters announced this week that they will all screen dancing competitions in the new year

A tale of two dancers

A remarkable documentary follows the progress of two teenage ballet dancers struggling to rise from the slums of Rio

Northern Ballet Theatre Gala

Saturday’s 40th anniversary gala showed that NBT and its artistic director, David Nixon, know how to throw a classy party

The best dance of the decade

From Darcey Bussell's last Royal Ballet performance to Alina Cojocaru's Giselle, we list the top ten dance events

Ballet Boyz put the beef into modern dance

They learnt moves from porn stars and pole dancers and say a former bad boy will be a big hit in their all-male company

Michael Flatley eat your heart out

The Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris has helped create a ‘Scottish Riverdance’ at Dance Base in Edinburgh

A Christmas cracker

Pick of the week: The Nutcracker by the Scottish Ballet at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow

Carlos Acosta: a godly Apollo

Dancer Carlos Acosta is all grace, strength and joy as a deity, a faun or a worthy successor to Mikhail Baryshnikov

Three stars for Carlos Acosta at Sadler's Wells

Dancing to Debussy’s iconic score, all Acosta has to do is stretch a leg to evoke a sense of physical excitement

Five stars for The Nutcracker

This is a Nutcracker to cherish, and it remains the finest I have seen in a lifetime of Nutcrackers, says Debra Craine

Margot Fonteyn: In her footsteps

As a BBC drama explores the life of Margot Fonteyn, a former ballerina asks whether British ballet can keep pace with the modern world

Confluence

An engaging cut-and-paste retrospective of Akram Khan and Nitin Sawhney’s joint artistic past, with bits of new tissue

Nice and teasy does it for a new breed of fan

Burlesque is attracting some surprising followers to its world of glitzy trash and feathers – in Glasgow

Svapnagata Festival

For fans of Akram Khan, this festival he curated with Nitin Sawhney offers a sense of his choreographic journey

Nation

God is dead, says the National’s Christmas show, but this prissy Pratchett adaptation never comes alive

Video: How to do Beyonce's 'Single Ladies' dance

Seventy million fans have watched the YouTube clip of the undoubted dance of the year. But how hard is Single Ladies?

BBC abandons ballet with deformed rapist Pope

The Spirit Of Diaghilev from Sadler’s Wells had been announced as one of the highlights of the Christmas schedule

Play/ Southern Comfort

Winlock is funny and convincing as a driven dancer constantly putting the men onstage with her firmly in their place