Art is a fickle subject – hence why many preeminent philosophers offer different theories as to how we can begin to understand the opposing effect the same object or creation can have on different people. Many can be mildly affected by a given entity, but occasionally something bigger can happen – some might say a revelation of sorts. And such a thing took place for me at the Royal Opera House yesterday evening.

What does _ _ _ _ mean to you? What does _ _ _ _ mean to us all? Questions asked every day by all kinds of people the world over. These same questions were posed last night at the London Coliseum about the doyen of 20th-century dance and choreography, Vaslav Nijinsky, at one of the Russian Ballet Icons galas that annually pack in an audience mostly made up of the Russian community London has now come to call its own.

Fifteen years ago two male ballet dancers took the awesome risk of leaving the Royal Ballet with an idea in their head about independence. Their first venture was a new Japanese ballet company, which quickly lost their interest as it hit a conventional showbizzy trail. Then they took their second perilous risk: Michael Nunn and William Trevitt boldly declared that they intended to make a point about the possibilities of male dancing in today’s Britain. Enter the Ballet Boyz.

Ballet Black open their eighth Linbury Studio Theatre season with a quadruple bill of new works which looks promising on paper but less so in actuality. The evening begins with Robert Binet’s EGAL, the title being a (now obsolete) Middle English word meaning equal, which Binet used as the piece’s crux. The work is a duet that’s meant to ‘"xplore the possibilities and complications that might arise if two people who are completely equal in every sense and ability were to encounter each other".

If you are a Bausch newbie, Vollmond (Full Moon) may well be the place to start. “It’s a full moon,” says Nazareth Panadero, giving us a cynical smirk. “Don’t get drunk,” she adds before sauntering off. Glasses are raised and, as always in Bausch, water flows, both in and, especially, out of glasses, across the stage, swept in buckets-full over the massive rock that looms at the edge of a great pool of water lurking invisibly at the rear.

Two world premieres in one night is almost more pressure than anyone can bear - choreographers, commissioning company or audience. Still more when the spotlit dancemakers are probably the two top Western names in the art, Alexei Ratmansky and Christopher Wheeldon. Everyone, but everyone, expects masterpieces.

Genius does not mean having no influences. Monotones, one of the very greatest of Frederick Ashton's ballets, is heavily influenced by other works: by George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations and Apollo, by Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère. And it in turn has influenced other great works: Kenneth MacMillan’s searing Gloria would not exist without this unearthly, moon-calm vision.

Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.

If by the end of a show you’ve both wowed and ouched out loud, I would declare it’s safe to say you’re getting your money's-worth. Tango Fire's new show at the Peacock Theatre, Flames of Desire, does all the above and more. In fact it could be described as the West End equivalent to a supermarket deal the average savvy consumer simply can’t resist – three for the price of one: exquisite dancers, a charismatic chanteur, and an electrifying band.

Feast aims high. Very, very high. Steered by experienced and much-lauded director Rufus Norris, five playwrights and one choreographer seek to make a fusion of physical theatre, dance, onstage music, straight drama, abstract poetic dialogue, projected animation and knockabout comedy to tell no less a story than 350 years of the history of the Yoruba people of west Africa. It spans four continents through recurring manifestations of a group of their “Orishas”, or gods, a series of meals, and an ongoing quest for eggs. Yeah, that old chestnut.