In London, seeing the same ballet company do three different pieces in three different theatres over four nights would be some kind of festival. In Berlin, it's just business as usual – albeit quite a busy week! – for the hard-working Staatsballett.

This new run of Kaash is an interesting test case for Akram Khan Company as its eponymous founder approaches his retirement from stage performance (forecast for next year). Kaash was Khan's first full-length work, created in 2002 and widely acclaimed at the time. But can Khan's older work stand up after 14 years in which Khan has consistently supplied the British dance scene with some of its most riveting shows (DESH, Gnosis, Sacred Monsters)?

One of the secrets to enjoying life is mastering the creative use of disappointment. Many in the Covent Garden audience last night were no doubt deeply disappointed not to be seeing Natalia Osipova's legendary portrayal of the title role in Giselle, injury having removed the Russian superstar from the opening night cast.

Claims to embody the spirit of flamenco, or to be born with flamenco in one's blood, abound in the programme of the annual Sadler's Wells flamenco festival. Sara Baras, whose show Voces opened the two week festival on Tuesday, doesn't make such a claim in writing: she doesn't need to. Her every move on stage radiates the self-possession of a flamenco aristocrat, a confidence so vital it simply bulldozes proscenium and fourth wall to set up a visceral – and vocal – relationship between audience and performer.

Christopher Wheeldon's new ballet Strapless scores a first on a number of counts. It’s the first co-production between the Royal Ballet and the Bolshoi (London gets first dibs – Moscow doesn’t get the goods for another 12 months). It forms part of the first ever triple bill the Royal Ballet has devoted to its most famous son. It’s the first ballet music Mark-Anthony Turnage has written to order. And it’s the first ballet on the Covent Garden main stage to feature a passionate gay male kiss.

Mark Bruce did very well with his last dance theatre production Dracula, but this time around he has reached a little too far. The Odyssey is a great text, but with the twists and turns of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, burdened with the karmic debt of multiple crimes against the gods committed during the Trojan War, Homer’s epic is an unwieldy beast: it’s at times as if Bruce had himself succumbed to the avalanche of challenges the tired and traumatised warrior has to face on his way home.

Sitting near the front at a Pina Bausch piece always provokes anxiety.

If you thought circus acrobats and Shostakovich were a daring combination, try circus acrobats and Monteverdi. While the spiky harmonies and vivd dynamics of 20th-century Russian string quartets sit pretty nicely with circus show-offery, surely Baroque music, with its steady continuo basses, its measured rise and fall, is a world away from tumbling tricks and strongman stunts?

Perhaps the director of the Royal Ballet is a pigeon fancier? With this January run of The Two Pigeons following hard on the heels of one in November, the Royal Ballet's dancers have spent most of the autumn and winter practising the fluttering, preening and cooing of Ashton's featherweight and featherbrained romance, while anyone wanting to see both Monotones and Rhapsody - paired with Pigeons in November and January respectively - has had to shell out for two tickets and sit through two doses of Pigeons' exhausting whimsy.

It’s being sold as the ideal ballet for first-timers, but I would blush to introduce even my neighbour’s cat to this Carry On Up the Harem hokum. Worse, its silliness verges on offensive. When, in Rudolph Nureyev’s 1990s production of La Bayadère for Paris Opera Ballet, a chorus of blacked-up picaninnies appeared for about three minutes, you blinked and put it down to an unwise attempt at historical accuracy.