The curtain rises onto a wall that totally blocks the view. A long silence... then, without warning, the wall collapses – to cheers of delight from the audience. For the rest of the evening, the dancers have to pick their way over rubble strewn across the middle ground that restricts free movement to strips of open space at the front and rear of the stage. 

It opens with a siren saying she’s got cramp. She’s glad she’s got cramp because she can stay outside and enjoy the sky. It closes with people blowing water at each other, glugged from plastic bottles. In between nothing happens.

Istanbul, even more than Rome, is the point in the world where tectonic plates of civilisations collide: Europe, Arabia and Asia, Muslim Istanbul and Christian Constantinople, fundamentalists and secularists, 21st-century women and 15th-century men. The smells of hookahs, roses and fish are part of the magic the city has from time immemorial radiated, beckoning traders and dealers, visitors and adventurers, to a place of shifting histories and irresistible mystery.

Premiered in 2007, Bamboo Blues was generated by a visit to Kolkata; and with the simplest of means, designer Peter Pabst conjures the vast landscapes of India. The first half unfolds against a backdrop of white muslin curtains rippling in the wind; the long hair and flowing dresses of the dancers are similarly activated by this elemental force, whose energy creates an ongoing  sense of excitement and expectation (even though we know the air currents are generated by a wind machine).

It may be that designer Peter Pabst is the unsung hero of Tanztheater Wuppertal’s “World Cities” extravaganza. When the lights go down at Sadler’s Wells for Der Fensterputzer (The Window-washer), the stage is dominated by a vast mountain of glowing red flowers, over four metres high, nine metres across, looming out of a modernistic black-box stage. It is a moment of pure, surging drama.

The Japanese dance public is overwhelmingly female, so it’s not surprising that Pina Bausch’s paean to Saitama, Ten Chi, is so girly. The fourth in the series of “World Cities” that’s sold out London’s two great dance centres, the Barbican and Sadler’s Wells, this late Bausch (2004) is pregnant with wish-fulfilment, gorgeous young men doing sexy things like watching while women bathe or disrobe, while a vast, muscular whale’s tail plunges erotically into the earth and soft plucking music washes through the darkness.

If you are tired of life, tired of London, or even tired of love, muster the remaining fibres of your frazzled being and do whatever it takes to get tickets for ...como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si... or any of the other performances in the Pina Bausch "World Cities" retrospective on at Sadler’s Wells and the Barbican over the next four weeks.

Many people will be having their first taste of the late Pina Bausch’s dance-theatre in this copious London retrospective of 10 of her “World City” productions; others will have bought into several of the series, possibly by now wondering how many hours they can take of her barbed view of men and women. For all of us, reading programme notes is beside the point; the background you need is what’s inside you, your memories, your songs, your susceptibilities.

It stymies any tourist to sum up for others what they saw abroad. Still more challenging, to create (or recreate) for theatre as a choreographer something more than superficial, more than clichéd about Italy, Japan, Los Angeles, Istanbul, these most clichéd of cultures. The opening of the monumental, enticing series of 10 of the late Pina Bausch’s “World Cities” season in London - a posthumous celebration of her talent - launched last night with the first of her views, Viktor, a production about Rome, postcards of Rome sent in Eighties Italy by a German choreographer.

Who would imagine that the search for new dance audiences would result in a cascade of fairy tales and dramas at Sadler's Wells, the focus for hip eyes on culture? But it is so - The Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale all appear this year (following dear old Nutcracker over the Christmas period), though in radical new versions. Matthew Bourne has been commissioned to produce a new Sleeping Beauty for winter 2012, in the line of his previous classic rewrites Swan Lake, Cinderella and Nutcracker!.