There is a special poignancy to these performances of Sacred Monsters, Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan's terrific 2006 joint show.

The 1871 ballet that goes by the name of Don Quixote has always been a challenge to stage. Barely a tenth of its two hours-plus concerns the titular knight and his crackpot wanderings. The rest is fixed like a town hall security camera on the non-events of a square in Barcelona, where a flighty barmaid and a feckless barber fall in and out of love every few seconds while the townspeople stand about and watch.

How long should a dance programme be? Opera and theatre habitués can be surprised by outings to contemporary dance, where the pieces might be shorter than the intervals, and a 7:30 start could see you comfortably on the 9:15 train home. But the early train is in no danger from Rambert’s new programme, their annual showcase of contemporary creations at Sadler’s Wells, which features one world première, one London première, and one revival from this time last year, and last night came in at a handsome two and a half hours.

Were it not for William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the vocal and instrumental ensemble he started in Paris in the 1970s, the beauties of the musical French Baroque might have remained a dusty fact of pre-Revolutionary history. As it is, there is barely a singer, player or conductor now performing Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Charpentier et al who has not benefited from the life’s work of this diligent conductor-musicologist. Through him, their arts are indeed flourishing.

I am picturing a scene in BBC4’s highly fortified underground headquarters, a conversation between its mastermind-in-chief and a hapless minion. “What do we do well, Stanley?” “History documentaries, boss.”  “And what do people, according to the immutable proofs furnished by viewing figures, actually like?” “Ballroom dancing programmes, boss. Costume dramas. And unashamedly populist, good-looking young historians.”  “Correct, Stanley. So waltz yourself over to the phone to get Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley to do us a three-part series on the history of ballroom dancing.

English National Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet have staged programmes of war pieces already this year; now here's the Royal Ballet bringing up the rear in its own inimitable (and rather oblique) fashion with a triple bill that picks up on and subtly plays with the anxiety felt by those great British artists, Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden, in the 1930s and 1940s. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Lloyd Newson has created a new theatrical language. Verbatim drama and intricate choreography would seem, on paper, to be fatally competing elements, yet Newson’s hypnotic fusion charges both word and movement with fresh meaning. Critically, the dance element of this typically confrontational new work from his company DV8, covering such harrowing topics as domestic violence, rape, incest, addiction and criminality, prevents it from slipping into hackneyed territory.

When you're talking about dancers, the old adage about genius being 99% perspiration has a point. You have to work damned hard just to be average in professional dance; to be good, like Akram Khan and Israel Galván are good, takes sweat (and tears and blood, like as not). Still, all the perspiration in the world won't avail if you don't have that 1% of inspiration, a little blue flame of a pilot light in your soul, ready to spark the gas jets of hard work into fiery life, rather than just a lot of hot air.

The challenge was already in the title for me: as both a dance critic and a strongly visual person, in the normal order of things I see the dance first and hear the music second.

Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility.