Sylvie Guillem is back, chicken-skinny, middle-aged, dressed like a dowd. Did I just write that? And let’s add: as swift as mercury, as exact as a feather, as light as the sun, and as eternal in intelligent beauty as Nefertiti. In contemporary dance, as I was saying at the weekend, it should be permissible to sit in the dark wondering at the inexplicable and the unbelievable. This great ballerina of our era is both inexplicable and unbelievable, in physique and in temperament.

Yesterday was a day when male physicality and the science of movement preoccupied - when you watch Rafa Nadal or Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, you can’t help thinking about the contrasts of grace that achieve the same athletic needs; Nadal the pouncing cheetah, the rich, weighty speed of Tsonga. Thing is, when you watch programmes about the greatness of tennis, they don’t try to persuade you that it’s just as good to watch if you yourself learn to play and get it filmed for the public's delight.

The two-course evening out is made possible by the Wigmore Hall’s late Friday-night concerts, so if you get out of a central-London show - or dinner - by, say, 9.30, you can add a second layer of entertainment at 10. In my case, a ferociously poor hour spent at contemporary dance in Sadler’s Wells was offset by an hour with Joanna MacGregor in a stimulating splicing of Bach and Shostakovich piano music that at least offered something to think about, if not ultimate satisfaction. Evening not entirely wasted, then.

When asked if I wanted to go and see two dozen naked Canadians doing audience participation, the answer was, self-evidently, nonononononononono. And then, for good measure, NO. Well, I’m here to tell you, I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I apologise to Dave St-Pierre and Company for my foolish prejudices. Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde ("A little tenderness, for Pete's sake") is an amazing evening of theatre.

Paul Taylor's Roses is called Roses because, well, because it is. There are no roses here, no flowery sentiment, no overwrought angst and emotion. This, one of Taylor’s most beautifully serene works, is the smell of roses on a still May evening: fleeting, evanescent and heart-breakingly beautiful. It is also some of the most magisterial - and startlingly original - choreography, even a quarter of a century after it was first made.

David Nixon has been artistic director of Northern Ballet for a decade, and it’s probably safe to say he is the king of the story ballet: Wuthering Heights, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Madame Butterfly, Dracula – if it’s got a story, he is, seemingly, willing to tell it. As Christopher Wheeldon’s recent Alice in Wonderland for the Royal Ballet showed, this is not as easy as might first appear. Nixon shoots straight from the hip: he is interested in narrative, he loves answering the question, “What happened then?”

In a world crying out for even below-mediocre ballet choreographers (Benjamin Millepied, anyone?), the Dutch old master Hans Van Manen is an extraordinarily well-kept secret. Why a man of such superb balletic accomplishment, theatrical instincts and calligraphic and technical skill remains barely acknowledged in Britain is presumably down to sex. His idea of sexy ballet, that is, being alien to upright British sensibilities.

Pénombre, penumbra: "The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, when the light source is larger than a point source and only part of its light is cut off (contrasted with the full shadow or umbra)." Pénombre, penumbra: "An area where shade blends with light; a shadowy area." Pénombre, penumbra: "A faint intimation of something undesirable; a peripheral region of uncertain extent; a group of things only partially belonging to some central thing." So even as we start, we are already in the shadows.

Sad news for arts lovers with an eye on the horses - Sadler’s Wells, dubbed the greatest-ever sire of racehorses, died this week aged 30. His parents were the champion sire Northern Dancer and Fairy Bridge, and the arts supplied the names for racing's most legendary dynasty that would dance to victory again and again. Half-brother to Nijinsky and Nureyev, sire of Old Vic, Sadler's Wells brought the dancing line in horseracing to a superb peak.

Sometimes, watching contemporary dance, you feel that no choreographer has ever known a happy moment – such angst, such grief, such terrible agony rolls over the footlights out to the audience that arriving at the theatre feeling mildly content can seem like an act of subversion. On their last night of this too-short season, however, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas company produced one of her most joyous and enjoyable pieces. For as the choreographer reminds us here, joy, cheerfulness and even sheer good temper are also emotions, and also worth exploring.