The past is a hard card to play for a contemporary dance company, even harder than for a ballet company. A work that’s proved over time, whose quality emerges and re-emerges with revisiting, casts an imposing shadow over new works created in the ethos and fashions of the contemporary.

A new publicly funded UK web channel for performing arts opens tomorrow morning, preparing for a major launch this weekend streaming top international streetdancers to the web audience and publishing John Peel's notes on his record collection. The channel, called The Space, is funded by the Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC, and will run for six months over and through the Olympics period as an on-demand channel to put performance out via smartphones, tablets and computers.

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire carries with it an enormous loading from its past, the associations with those iconic performers on stage and screen Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh not the least of them. For a narrative dance, that hothouse close-up combat between the hapless Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, her sister’s boorish husband, needed a fresh revising and some bravely independent performing. Much kudos to Scottish Ballet for creating and pulling off a genuinely involving new dance-drama which looks as stylish as it feels emotionally substantiated.

William Forsythe's position as the most articulate, fascinating, provocative ballet choreographer of the past 25 years is demonstrated by the Royal Ballet of Flanders' brief visit to Sadler's Wells for three nights with his epic, maddening, engrossing creation, Artifact. The cutting edge of theatre and ballet at its premiere in 1984, it is a four-act ballet, no less, that pays homage to the early court spectacles out of which ballet was born, and the superb physical elegance into which classical ballet then evolved.

This is a great spring for dance-lovers. Tucked in for two nights at Sadler's Wells (catch it again tonight) is the return of Wayne McGregor's FAR, well timed to appear just before his latest ballet at Covent Garden next week. Uniquely among choreographers today, McGregor has two lives; two selves; two creative identities. The better known is that cool cult-leader at the Royal Ballet, with his slink-and-fidget on pointe that looks so trendy on classically trained ballerinas.

This show was intended to be all about the men (see title). But it was the woman in motion who stormed off with the honours in this second edition of what has become tagged as the Sergei Polunin show. And a heavy, maternally hipped, middle-aged woman at that - step forward, the sensational Dana Fouras, a dancer of genius who blew every other performer off the stage in Russell Maliphant’s Two (including the hapless gentleman trying to duplicate her movements on the other side of the stage).

NDT2 is a fascinating beast. The “junior” company of the venerable Nederlands Dans Theater, it features dancers on the cusp of maturity, aged generally between sixteen and their mid-twenties. Here, in choreography created especially for them, one can watch talent develop. And since the grown-up NDT-ers are known as some of the most exhilaratingly talented dancers in Europe, that is something very special.

The one thing you can count on at an Alston evening is the quality of the music: everything Alston does, and everything he creates for his dancers, revolves around the music. In his wonderful Roughcut, Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for clarinet and tape begins before the house lights dim, his sharp, vibrant phrases giving a sense of urgency to the audience before they have even settled down.

Flamenco is a fervently political dance language, riddled with subversion of class and gender rankings, honouring old people, hallowing sexual prowess, relishing mavericks, and yet commanding a special symbolic force when it's disciplined into a cuerpo de baile.