I was taken to task by a commenter this year who told me I should go and review music, if I couldn't enjoy dance. Hm. One takes such things to heart, but it's humbug. While piling up memories over 25 years might mean that the noise in my memory is getting more and more obtrusive, that doesn't mean you can't suddenly find the corker one night that wipes the field clean and places a new memory there which will move your yardstick yet again.

What a stunning show Matthew Bourne has created in his Blitz-era Cinderella - truly a magical ride created from what was in its original 1997 form a pumpkin waiting to be transformed. This must be the most heartwarming and sophisticatedly rewarding Christmas show in London, filled with a huge love of the city and a moving homage to humanity in wartime.

If only such a bubble of foolish hype did not follow Wayne McGregor wherever he goes, such bloated talk of reinventing dance, injecting it with brains, and infusing it with new chemical sensitivities and practically supernatural powers, one would be able to look at what his contribution to theatre is more clearly. He is not the Heston Blumenthal of dance.

“Nice is different from good,” sings one of Stephen Sondheim’s characters. And mostly, it is different, “nice” rarely being “good”. Christopher Bruce, however, blows that theory right out of the water, because Hush, his 2006 piece which opens Rambert’s Sadler’s Wells season, is both good and nice. And that’s much more remarkable than it seems: attempting to find the beauty, the depth and the radiance of “good” has caused many great artists to stumble. That Bruce achieves his goals with such serenity and power seems little short of miraculous.

It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion?

How do young modern choreographers engage with their audience? With references from the street - motion that the audience knows and recognises? With musical expressiveness? With the development of a technical style that has a language of its own? How about with an instinct, a yearning to entertain? Surely not!

Iphigenia is an abandoned child, almost murdered by her father, lost in bewilderment, captured and indoctrinated in an artificial existence. It hardly matters that her father was the legendary Greek hero Agamemnon, her mother the notorious Clytemnestra.

I’ll retain lifelong, life-changing memories of the joyous mysteries of Merce Cunningham’s dances, so it’s unimportant for me that Nearly Ninety, his final creation before his death last year, won’t be one of them. Naturally his company brought it like a memorial on their farewell world tour before the troupe closes down, but last night’s UK premiere of it at the Barbican felt both sketchy and cumbersome, overburdened with fussy set and effects, and underburdened with the usual vigour and unearthly certainty of his dance.

Tonight the company dedicated to the greatest radical of modern dance, Merce Cunningham, opens its farewell tour to London, a valedictory odyssey that will end next year. Last year Cunningham died, aged 90. He had just premiered a work called Nearly Ninety, and this is fittingly the last thing we will see of his company as it blazes one final circuit before closing down in December 2011.

A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a few dozen other people, who happened to be in the right Tate Modern gallery at the right moment when this extraordinary little event took place.