Some ballets are drugs in themselves - you’re under their sway no matter what the performance. Other ballets need drugs to help. This new Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is definitely of the second kind, a very odd, very shallow, very bright and brilliantly bold staging, that makes no sense, that offers no depth, but which I suspect would be a blast if one were slightly stoned. But to slip a complimentary spliff under the programme's whirligig cover would take it out of the small-children Christmas market that I guess this enterprise is to occupy with the same massive box-office success as the cod-Ashton animalfest Tales of Beatrix Potter.

An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this unpredictable man. Last night’s ovation indicates they shouldn't worry.

There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.

Aylesbury, a town without a theatre, has built itself one - a gleaming, glass-fronted, smack-you-in-the-eye 1,500-seater, driven and supported by the district council. High Wycombe and Milton Keynes must beware, so thin are the pickings these days for the regional theatres. The pity is that the Ballet Boyz’ show The Talent last night was the only night of decent dance programmed in this amazing new venue for half of 2011.

It is perfectly true that, as Arthur Marshall once said of Ibsen, I am Not a Fun One. A party really is a party without me there. And Shoes, now transferred from Sadler’s Wells, is not much of a party, whether I’m there or not.

What a difference 24 hours can make. The first night of ABT’s pick‘n’mix season – 10 ballets in six days – veered from “fine” on downwards. Another opening, another show, though, and things have picked up very nicely indeed. Ballet Theatre has on display in this programme its peerless historical range, from Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas (mounted on the company in 1940), through Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (choreographed for them in 1947), his 1960 Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and finally, and most wonderfully, Paul Taylor’s miraculous Company B: a piece that makes you want to dance, to sing, and fills you with a sorrowing pity, all at the same time.

What a difference 24 hours can make. The first night of ABT’s pick‘n’mix season – 10 ballets in six days – veered from “fine” on downwards. Another opening, another show, though, and things have picked up very nicely indeed. Ballet Theatre has on display in this programme its peerless historical range, from Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas (mounted on the company in 1940), through Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (choreographed for them in 1947), his 1960 Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and finally, and most wonderfully, Paul Taylor’s miraculous Company B: a piece that makes you want to dance, to sing, and fills you with a sorrowing pity, all at the same time.

Was it the worst-played and worst-danced performance of Duo Concertant I’ve ever seen? I can’t remember a direr in my experience of quite a few DCs. But then the opening night of American Ballet Theatre’s London tour was a set of fine promises falling flat with a thud. A delicate new sextet ruined by the piano player. A masterpiece of musical ballet murdered by the violinist, the pianist and the ballerina. A cod-ballet duet by Twyla Tharp deflated by an unhumorous leading lady. And the only tick - inasmuch as at least the dancers gave it what it needed - was a piece of ensemble window-dressing that ticked the “modern” boxes that used to pertain two decades ago.

At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

At last a terrific show in this year’s mime festival - Du Goudron et des plumes (Tar and Feathers), in which you gasp at the brilliance with which the French acrobatic troupe, Compagnie MPTA/Mathurin Bolze, invent a wondrously unstable world on a swinging raft that's deliciously mad and imaginative. It’s as if echoes of a children’s game on swings had suddenly mushroomed into a sphere of its own sound and motion laws, and in the dark, bare Barbican Theatre is a perfect place to watch it. Hurry - you have just two nights left.

The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event.

The return of the Royal Ballet’s Swan Lake production coincides with the tumult over the film Black Swan, about which the company’s marketing department must be pretty pleased, even if some of the dancers aren’t. The chief surprise for any newcomers drawn to the ballet by the film, obsessing as it does about the leading ballerina, must be how long it takes to meet the Swan Queen at all.