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January is something of a palate-cleanser for the year, as the London International Mime Festival flies in plane-loads of companies bearing gnomic names in a kind of dance-world Desperanto that’s equally incomprehensible in every language. Like cars or tourist T-shirt slogans, titles like Plexus or Ephemeral Architectures label what’s now called ‘visual theatre’, with copious explanatory notes translated between four languages, gaining comic value at every stage. I don’t know why they don’t just write, ‘We’re playing. The sponsor paid.’ (Mark Morris is the only choreographer I know who says, ‘I make up dances and you watch ’em.

There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan Vasiliev ‘right’ for Swan Lake? Is English National Ballet right to accept such huge thighs in this of all classics, when the sizeist cohorts of the Russian establishment always said nyet to the sturdy, forceful Belarussian? That peculiar balletic categorisation ‘emploi’ has been invoked even by British critics. Emploi means ‘rightness’ as a ‘type’ for a role. Emploi was what drove Mikhail Baryshnikov, another short man condemned at home by his build to demi-caractère parts, to quit Russia and its narrowmindedness and redefine himself as danseur noble in the West.

A new year must start with hope and resolution, and if you’re very rich, with influence in the highest places, I’d urge you to resolve to dust off the private jet and get to Paris quick this weekend hoping to find a ticket somehow for the last Châtelet performances of An American in Paris, Christopher Wheeldon’s s’wonderful, s’marvellous new staging of the Gershwin/Minnelli musical film. Or book for New York in March when the show moves to its second home on Broadway. But surely there must be a UK run soon. It’s the first big dance-musical of the Royal Ballet’s favourite son, which is why we should pay attention. The secret of Christopher Wheeldon’s current status at 41 as blue-eyed boy of the Western ballet world is his geniality.

One feels the pang of impending failure whenever the Royal Ballet ventures like a deluded Don Quixote into a periodic quest to stage that delightful old ballet named after him. Twice in recent years has it tilted at the windmill and flopped back, dazed and bruised. It never remembers, though, and here it goes a third time. A Spanish romp in the sun, with brilliant dancing, silly comedy and a happy ending, makes a perfect change from the usual Christmas Nutcracker, does it not? And nowadays, with such a substantial cohort of Cuban, Argentinian, Brazilian and Spanish dancers the Royal should be able to scorch the floor in required style, shouldn’t it?

I’m dashing between dance theatres at the moment and there’s just so much to tell you about. I could linger on Sacred Monsters, the captivating conversation-piece at Sadler’s Wells for Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan — conversational being the word, for these genius dancers also talk to us, which is rather like Garbo laughing. Guillem’s voice is a delightful discovery: it’s a soprano timbre, bubbling Frenchly with dropped aitches and baroque flexibility. She tells us cute stories about Charlie Brown’s sister ‘Sall-ee’ and her wish always to be ‘émerveillée’in life, while Khan confides his anxiety about balding.

The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another, leaving only fragments of the past. With luck, these pass through the hands of curious collectors dedicated to bridging the gaps formed by the desecrations of time, before reaching a terminus point in a museum as votive offerings on the altar of culture. And that’s where it so often goes wrong. Charged with the care and conservation of these precious fragments, curators can all too easily become anxious hoarders of knowledge instead of agile communicators serving a synaptic function between object and audience.

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan. Consequently I have to short-change some of the highlights (note for next year’s diaries, folks — October is invariably the dance month of the year), including the liberation of ice-skating by the Canadians of Le Patin Libre, who made Alexandra Palace rink feel like a frozen field with their casual pyrotechnics (ice-o-technics?).

English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann, colleagues but of different instincts, one for dance, the other for drama. The case is currently being made for each by the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet. But how to revive the sensations and imaginings of the 1940s? It was long before most of us were even born, and more than any other art form ballet is dependent on evoking memory, atmospheres, intangible associations. Ashton, who emerged as the creative giant of the Royal Ballet’s nurturing, has recently been as out of fashion as furs and cocktail parties.

GCSE Eng Lit pupils are doing well from dance this season with two set books told in the medium of dance, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and even Dylan Thomas gets a look in. As the two stories have similar dynamics and dramatic themes, it was fascinating to see both in a single week and witness how mightily one succeeded and the other did not. Matthew Bourne is so famed as a rewriter of classical ballets that one might underestimate the boldness of imagination that underlies them.

Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the Union Flag — doesn’t work any better than the original green-tree symbol. The old symbol demonstrated Conservative values as imagined by the Innocent smoothie design team. It said ‘Tradition’. It said ‘the Environment’. It said, ‘Look what I can do with my crayons, Mummy.’ Stephen Bayley, design expert and Spectator colleague, was one of the hapless advisers tasked with picking the old logo. ‘Not so great,’ he told me, ‘but you should have seen the alternatives.

What can the Royal Opera House be insinuating about its target audience? No sooner had Anna Nicole closed than Manon opened the new ballet season. Kenneth MacMillan’s gold-digger turns 40 this year but her promiscuous allure shows no signs of failing punters with money to burn on sex thrills. I once took my partner to see Sylvie Guillem as Manon. His verdict was, ‘Too immoral’. I guess he got MacMillan’s point rather well. Manon has no heart at all, she is deliciously low. Since 1974 she has dodged bullets when powers-that-be proposed that a conscienceless tart had no place in the Royal repertoire.

It’s the tub of bright red geraniums at the heart of the picture that startles. How did anyone have time (or energy) to water these bright, hopeful flowers amid the chaos of a field hospital in early 1915? ‘Tents with Stores and Flower Tub’ is one of ten paintings by Victor Tardieu in the Florence Nightingale Museum’s latest exhibition, dedicated to the pioneering work of the first world war nurses. Tardieu, a French artist who went to the front as an officer in an ambulance unit, created a vivid record of the makeshift camp in Bourbourg set up by volunteer nurses led by the indomitable Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland (portrayed above), who bought her own ambulance, filled it with bandages and took it across the Channel.

The New York-based sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard comes from a long line of Polish and Ukrainian peasant farmers. She was born in Germany in 1942 on a forced labour farm to which her parents had been transported by the Nazis. Her early memories are of a wooden world — of huts, fences, domestic utensils and tools — on the farm and in postwar refugee camps.

Anne Seymour Damer (1748–1828) was virtually the only female sculptor working in Britain during her lifetime. Contemporary artists may have dismissed her as a well-connected dilettante with curiosity value as a woman. But her most important connection was her uncle, Horace Walpole. He warmly praised his niece’s abilities: her terracotta ‘Shock Dog’ of 1780 (see above) he compared to a work by Bernini. On his death, he bequeathed her his country retreat, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham. This house is a fitting venue for Anne Seymour Damer – Sculpture and Society (until 9 November).

Last week, the feast of long-awaited dance events on offer echoed bygone days when London life was dominated by the strategically engineered appearances of rival ballet stars at the same time in different venues. At the London Coliseum, Solo for Two featured one of ballet’s super-duper couples, Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev. As Osipova told me in a recent interview, their aim was to tackle choreographic modes outside their standard repertoire. Alas, bravery and bravura do not always go together. The classically trained Mikhail Baryshnikov and, more recently, Sylvie Guillem have made successful forays into modern and postmodern dance, but they were very much the exception. Let’s not forget what happened when Nureyev tried to dance Graham.

And they’re off. The mighty caravan of romantic desperadoes, radical egoists, stadium wannabes, struggling superstars and vanity crackheads is on its way to Edinburgh. This year’s Fringe sponsor is Virgin Money, which must be some kind of in-joke because most performers spend August watching their life savings being ritually despoiled by landlords, press agents and venue owners. Five years back the Fringe was ready for a gastric band when it grew to more than 2,000 productions. This year it glides past the 3,000 mark and it seems determined to maintain its place as the most cluttered congregation of twits and pipe-dreamers on the planet.