It might be quite unnerving for a young performer to have the première of a new solo show take place in the same building, at the same time, as Sylvie Guillem is dancing William Forsythe, Mats Ek and Jiří Kylián. But Aakash Odedra, who presented two new pieces, Murmur and Inked, in the Patrick Centre inside the Birmingham Hippodrome on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, has had more dealings than most with superstar dancers and choreographers: his mentor Akram Khan is both (and incidentally a collaborator of Guillem’s).

If, standing on a station platform, your arms want to make shapes in the air; if, walking home, you are mesmerised by the curved toes of your shoes against the pavement; if, in the kitchen, a stray salad leaf on the floor transforms before your eyes into a tiny green lizard, head up, questioning – then (if you are over the age of 10 and reasonably level-headed) you have probably consumed some mind-altering substance.

The first time you see a Shechter piece, you feel it, literally as well as figuratively: percussive is a mild word for his forceful choreography, the stamping, churning, yearning of his sweeping shapes and rhythms. Percussive is the music, too (Shechter played drums in a rock band), which he co-writes, and it is played at volumes that make it vibrate through the theatre.

William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in a week - it has to be Sadler’s Wells, the theatre to sample some of the world’s best dance stuff. De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are briefly here to take part in Sadler’s "Sampled", a new thread of summer performances surrounding a single famous piece with chat, film, interactivity and other related things.

Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the notorious Rite of Spring since its premiere exactly a century ago. 

Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.

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.