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Last Wednesday two of the three live pooches that appeared in Pina Bausch’s Viktor did onstage what most dogs do when in a state of arousal. The incident, which elicited a great deal of audience laughter and repressed giggles on stage, would have amused the late Bausch. First seen in 1986, Viktor was the first of the many city-specific works that Bausch created and on which the current World Cities 2012 retrospective (at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican) focuses. Viktor’s rhapsodic and episodic narrative comes from the theatricalisation of memories each member of the Tanztheater Wuppertal had of their experiences in a particular location. Viktor is about Rome, though not the Rome one sees in travel books, postcards or holiday snaps.

Shadows and reflections have always triggered all sorts of fantasies. Theatre itself, in the words of many playwrights and theorists, is nothing but a game of shadows. Today, filmic and computer-generated or manipulated projections have taken the place of what was once cleverly done with candles and mirrors. Indeed, projections seem to have become a distinctive and annoyingly trendy trademark of contemporary theatre, for they seem to pop up everywhere, more or less appropriately. Tired of images that detract and distract from both the music and the meaningful or expressive physicality of dance performances, I, like many, believe that using projections to add an aura of pseudo-cultural gravitas to a piece is the main indicator of poor creativity.

Last year, when I reviewed The Sum of Parts, the community-oriented piece produced by Connect, Sadler’s Wells Creative Learning department, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to do any better. Well, I was wrong, as this year’s Compass was an even more breathtaking experience. The new project, which involves more than 100 non-professional performers and a unique roster of artists, has been conceived at a time when World Cities 2012, Pina Bausch’s retrospective of works devoted to cities and cultures from around the world, is imminent. Compass, however, focuses only on London, which is a vibrant melting pot of diverse and complementary cultures.

Artifact was the first work that the groundbreaking dance-maker William Forsythe created in 1984 for the legendary Ballet Frankfurt. It is, therefore, pure ‘vintage’ Forsythe, even though it is as aggressively and engagingly provocative today as it was 28 years ago. It therefore comes across as a theatrically vibrant reminder of where it all started. Central are the quirky postmodern challenges that Forsythe first laid down to both the ballet canons and the set rules of traditional theatre-going. Hence the curtain coming down and going up more or less unexpectedly and/or arbitrarily, an idea aimed at questioning the way audiences used to watch — and still do — a ballet, which was to become Steptext’s main feature one year later, in 1985.

It was about time a dance-maker exacted revenge on dance academics. In Alexander Ekman’s 2010 Cacti, a voiceover explains the alleged semantics of the choreography by resorting to theoretical clichés and the known modes of that mental self-pleasuring that many academics indulge in. As the vacuously pompous words bear little or no relation to the quirky actions, the contrast between the taped voice and the dancing becomes explosively comic. Later on, recorded voices are also used to let viewers peep into the minds of two dancers performing a duet, humorously highlighting the kind of artistically detached thinking performers frequently engage in while dancing.

‘Aerial’ ballets were all the rage in late-Victorian London. It mattered little that they were more circus acts than actual ballets; their female stars, swinging from either a trapeze or sturdy ropes, were worshipped on a par with the greatest ballerinas — as in Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus. I often wonder what those people would think of their postmodern successors, as performing with ropes seems to be a growing trend within contemporary dance-making. Take Ilona’s Jäntti’s Handspun, which opened the Exposure: Dance programme at the Linbury Studio Theatre last week.

At first sight, the new Royal Ballet double bill might come across as an odd coupling: Ashton’s sparkling The Dream on one side, MacMillan’s metaphorically sombre Song of the Earth on the other. Yet the two works are complementary in that they show two distinctive and historically significant facets of 20th-century British dance-making. On the opening night, an impressive roster of stars appeared in MacMillan’s reading of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. The refined artistry of Tamara Rojo, Sarah Lamb, Lauren Cuthbertson, Carlos Acosta and Rupert Pennefather turned the performance into one of the best I have seen. Stars populated The Dream, too.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s and Jérôme Bel’s 3Abschied is the latest addition to a long and historically well-established series of choreographic works set to music by Gustav Mahler. There are still those, however, who cringe at the idea of dancing to the notes of this revered composer — as Keersmaeker points out in her initial monologue where she recounts her encounter with the conductor supremo Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim’s words linger menacingly through most of the performance. When Keersmaeker first dances to the ‘Abschied’, from Das Lied von der Erde (in a Schoenberg transcription), played live on stage by the superb Ictus ensemble, one can hear the words ‘I told you so’ ringing eerily in the dark.

For more than 40 years, Scottish Ballet has been one of the most vibrant and interesting companies on the UK dance scene. It is a ballet company born of a well considered vision and the desire to prove that there can be good ballet without grandiose spectacle. Indeed, for many years it has been notable for its almost ‘chamber’-like choreographic repertoire, which has included intelligent adaptations of the great classics. Now a new chapter is about to start, as Christopher Hampson takes over the company’s artistic directorship, succeeding Ashley Page and an impressively illustrious roster of equally enlightened directors.

The term ‘fusion’ is a trendy one, which hints at the interaction of ingredients from different backgrounds in many areas of today’s culture. In dance, it often refers to the pairing of different genres, such as modern dance or hip-hop and ballet, or to the coupling of a distinctively western choreographic idiom with an equally distinctive non-western one. In Rian, the award-winning choreographer and performance-maker Michael Keegan-Dolan has opted for a more intricate game of combinations by weaving together Liam Ó Maonlaí’s splendid music — itself a powerful mix of influences and quotations — with dancing that draws upon a diversity of backgrounds and styles.

In its latest triple bill, the Royal Ballet pays tribute to three dance-makers who have marked distinctive epochs in its performance history. Its centrepiece is Frederick Ashton’s 1963 Marguerite and Armand. Created as a showcase for the now legendary partnership of Fonteyn/Nureyev, this one-acter highlights his unique talent for succinct storytelling, as Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias is narrated through a rapid series of salient episodes. Ashton’s dance drama has none of the grandeur traditionally associated with either Verdi’s La traviata, or the cinematic works based on by the same text, such as Garbo’s memorable Camille. Here the story is treated as an intimate drama relived in the memory of dying Marguerite.