There seems to be a perverse trend among bands these days to give themselves names that render them near-invisible to the modern search engine. Hot on the heels of US boy duo Girls comes BOY, a pair of Hamburg-based female voices whose infectious hooks and rapturous harmonies have already caused a bit of a stir in their native Germany and Switzerland – as well as on YouTube, to the tune of about four and a half million views.

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.

Can: The Lost Tapes

Kieron Tyler

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.

Diamonds one day, stones the next: compulsive giver Timon’s swift descent into raving misanthropy would be better packed into a gritty pop ballad than a full-length play. Still, Shakespeare just about pulls it off: having had more of a hindering than a helping hand from Thomas Middleton in early scenes, he comes into his own with howling, Lear-like invective.

Other towns may choose national heroes as their emblems – posing generals, politicians or sword-wielding officers on horseback, glaring sternly down from their plinths – but not Göttingen. It is entirely in keeping with the unassuming, unobtrusive loveliness of this small town in Lower Saxony that its symbol should be not a grandee but a goose-girl.

Did Magda Goebbels do her children a favour by murdering all six of them in the bunker? Her rationale, as reported in the film Downfall, was the impossibility of imagining a life after Hitler for anyone called Goebbels.

Simon Stephens is not only one of our most talented playwrights, he’s also the one most open to influences from German theatre. In 2007, he collaborated with director Sebastian Nübling on the world premiere in Hanover of his innovative play, Pornography, which took more than a year to be staged in the UK, in a superb version by Sean Holmes. Holmes is now head of the Lyric Hammersmith, which hosts Stephens’s latest collaboration with Nübling.