Performances of Frederick Ashton’s ballets are few and far between these days – though in New York we do have Sylvia to look forward to in American Ballet Theatre’s summer season – so when I heard that the Sarasota Ballet was bringing back The Two Pigeons, which it first presented a year ago, together with Les Patineurs, which has also become a rarity, I decided a trip to Florida was called for. It proved to be well worthwhile. Iain Webb, who became artistic director of the company 17 months ago, has ambitious plans, coupled with a sense of history. Not only has he presented ballets that you might see anywhere, such as Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15 and Allegro brillante, and Tudor’s Lilac Garden, but he has a particular interest in Ashton’s work – Alexander Grant staged Façade in January 2008 – and in Sadler’s Wells repertory too. One might even say Vic-Wells, because he has also brought in Ninette de Valois’s The Rake’s Progress and Checkmate (the first US company to do so, I believe). It helps too that Webb is married to Margaret Barbieri, who shares his experience of dancing these ballets and can be relied on for authentic staging, as here.

It was hard to convince oneself that Unleashed, the new show by Spanish dance heartthrob and media celebrity Joaquín Cortés, was a dance recital rather than a pop concert. Held for just two nights at Camden’s The Roundhouse (not a particularly good venue for dance on this viewing), the arena area around the centrally placed stage platform was packed with standing figures supping pints or attempting to capture the performance on their mobile phones. The atmosphere was hot, sweaty, noisy, and heavy with anticipation whilst an onstage flamenco band wailed, stamped and clapped their way through a musical introduction.

For all its popularity Swan Lake remains one of the most challenging of the great classics – to stage as well as to perform. One only has to remember the crackpot version created by Jan Fabre for the Royal Ballet of Flanders in 2002 to realise how treacherous the pond can be. It’s all the more heartening, therefore, that seven years later, Kathryn Bennetts, artistic director of the Flanders company, has commissioned a brand new Swan Lake. Premiered on January 24, the new production can be saluted as a magnificent achievement on two counts – as a staging and as a performance.