When Sadler's Wells 10th Flamenco Festival opens tomorrow night with thudding heels, swirling skirts and wailing voices, some will sit there begging to know what the wailing is about. Dancers like Eva Yerbabuena and Israel Galván, singers like Estrella Morente, reach us deep in some inexpressible place with their performance, but their passion is driven by the evocative poetry of a powerful oral tradition going back some three centuries.

Fifteen years ago two male ballet dancers took the awesome risk of leaving the Royal Ballet with an idea in their head about independence. Their first venture was a new Japanese ballet company, which quickly lost their interest as it hit a conventional showbizzy trail. Then they took their second perilous risk: Michael Nunn and William Trevitt boldly declared that they intended to make a point about the possibilities of male dancing in today’s Britain. Enter the Ballet Boyz.

If you are a Bausch newbie, Vollmond (Full Moon) may well be the place to start. “It’s a full moon,” says Nazareth Panadero, giving us a cynical smirk. “Don’t get drunk,” she adds before sauntering off. Glasses are raised and, as always in Bausch, water flows, both in and, especially, out of glasses, across the stage, swept in buckets-full over the massive rock that looms at the edge of a great pool of water lurking invisibly at the rear.

There is never a dull moment in this three-hour historical epic, even if it is not always clear what is going on. Directed by Gregory Doran, of the RSC, Anjin follows the 17th-century story of William Adams, the first Englishman to land in Japan. The production has lines in English and Japanese, with surtitles above the stage and on either side, but it is sometimes difficult to read the words and watch the characters, especially for audience members in the middle of the stalls.

Offstage dramas made more waves than onstage, where dance-followers have much less to see, and a prospect of still less in this arid immediate future. The on-dit revolved around the Olympics ceremonies, TV dance, Michael Clark and some spectacular door-slamming by a young ballet dancer who bolstered the myth that we would all be happier if we quit an arcanely dedicated, quietly hardworking world where we were notably appreciated by the team, in order to take quick riches, dubious star vehicles and avid media spotlights.

It depends what you expect. This is Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty. So what do you expect of (a) Matthew Bourne and (b) The Sleeping Beauty? On both counts I’d answer: much more than we get here. Bourne at his best is brilliant - his Swan Lake, his Play Without Words, are two of the most rewarding and entertaining (I mean moving the heart, as well as hugely gratifying the visual palate) shows in dance in the past generation. His Nutcracker! is young, sexy and amusing.

Batsheva Dance Company is reaching its half-century, which makes it, as one of the world’s leading dance brands, not quite as old – or as young – as Israel, but Martha Graham helped launch it several years before the 1967 Six Day War. An international mix, it is in fact two companies, the senior one and the Ensemble, currently touring Britain and made up of youngsters who might or might not graduate to the main, Tel Aviv-based troupe. Ohad Naharin has been in charge since 1990, which was also when the junior fraction was created.

The Jasmin Vardimon Company bring their latest creation, FREEDOM, to Sadler’s Wells this week for two nights only. The work is best described as a collection of vignettes (supposedly) discussing the subject of freedom, and any conflicting conditions. The programme literature confirms that Vardimon is assessing “political systems, social conditions and personal philosophies” within the piece – which is seriously fighting talk that wasn’t necessarily backed up.

Well, if De Keersmaeker made us work hard for our enlightenment earlier in the week, we more than get our reward with her triumphant, astonishing Cesena in the second part of her double-programme designed for the Avignon Festival.

No one ever accused of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of thinking small. Or not thinking, for that matter. Her international career began with a bang, when with only her second work she created Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. And Reich’s music, filled with repetitive figures, harmonic rhythm and canons, is not a million miles – even if it’s 600 years – away from the ars subtilior of Avignon, De Keersmaeker’s new musical focus.