We seek it here, we seek it there, we seek it everywhere - that dance work where you lose consciousness of all the hands behind it and surrender to one focus. In Russell Maliphant’s radiant AfterLight, dance, light, sound all move as one, a distilled 60-minute spell of dark, hushed beauty that touches on disturbing things: on ecstasy, madness, desire, jealousy, resignation to the void, and of course on Vaclav Nijinsky.

It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker ballet, In the Upper Room.

Quietly, without pomp and fanfare, Ashley Page has been mustering a balletic strike force over the border in Scotland. Scottish Ballet has launched the new ballet year with a programme that trumps anything else offered in Britain as a season opener, two demanding and brilliant works of the past (well done) and the gamble of a new creation of dance, music and design.

Museum shows don’t often evoke a sense of smell, but without even trying, this Ballets Russes exhibition has visitors’ nostrils flared. The show is – intentionally – a feast for the eye, and even for the ear, with ballet scores (sometimes rudely overlapping) playing in every room. But smell?

I have a friend who loves telling jokes. One night he started a well-worn story: “Please,” he said, “if you’ve heard this before, don’t stop me – it’s one of my favourites.” I am always reminded of that evening when watching Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – the Trocks to their many thousands of fans across the world – when they touch down in London on one of their regular stops. The jokes are great – the dance is pretty good too – and if the jokes are a bit familiar, well, that’s all part of the fun.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre is making one of its regular stops in Europe (the company tours commitedly: not only in the USA, but more than two months of each year are spent bringing their bravura dance style to the world). It is to their enduring credit, then, that their performances look as fresh and as spontaneous as they do.

Alvin Ailey dancers have been dancing about survival, grit, positivity and joy in the Lord for half a century now, and even though the parents of last night’s dancers may not have been born when Ailey did the unthinkable and launched a black dance company in the dark days of 1958 America, the company still evidently has an urge to rejoice running in its veins.

Every time I go to Sadler’s Wells now I come out wondering if there’s something wrong with my hearing, so loud and numbing are their speakers. It’s a blight on a lot of shows, but on none more so than Shoes, because this is the first major London production written by that celebrated musical witsmith Mr Richard Thomas since his Jerry Springer, The Opera, and last night I missed probably half the words that I’m guessing should be the chief merit.

I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much dancing either. No, it must be that eternal celluloid magic, the girlish fantasy of entering a favourite movie and touching Patrick Swayze’s ghost.

Charm is as invisible as the circus but as undeniably present in Le Cirque Invisible, an adorable little presentation for which parents should go miles with children to see this month. Charlie Chaplin’s fourth daughter and her husband are not young things any more, and their two-person show is at least 40 years old in its various guises - but they simply keep adding and subtracting gags, costumes, dressing-up box illusions, magic tricks, rabbits, soap-bubbles, locking down a hall of children and parents for two and a half hours in raptures.