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.

As its first gift to dance fans, the new year has delivered not one but two chamber pieces about extraordinary women. Down in Covent Garden this week, Will Tuckett's Elizabeth for Royal Ballet dancers is exploring the life and loves of Queen Elizabeth I, while up in Camden Akram Khan's Until the Lions takes a fresh look at the story of princess Amba, from the Indian classical epic the Mahabharata.

Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so few people: created in 2013 for a special performance in Greenwich and now restaged for a week's run in the Royal Opera House's Linbury studio theatre, it will reach a total audience of mere hundreds – but I'd back it for a month or more, and to be a huge hit with theatre-goers as well as dance-lovers.

When producing Cinderella, the main question is: sweet or sour?  That Prokofiev score is splendid, but it's no walk in a candy shop; in Act I the stepsisters have passages so scraping, spiky and dissonant that sugar-coating would seem to be out of the question. On the other hand, there's a Nutcracker-like family audience at the ready for pretty productions which skim lightly over the whole neglect and cruelty thing – but that leaves you with a story so bland that even Disney had to invent singing mice to perk it up.