Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.

In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having missed but whose success would almost certainly ensure a second run.

How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.

Valiant souls who have recently read the Margaret Atwood trilogy on which this new Wayne McGregor piece for the Royal Ballet is based will be at home with its time-shifting eco-sci-fi narrative. The rest of us, not so much.

In 2022, the American choreographer Pam Tanowitz made a duet on Royal Ballet principals William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan, which they performed at the company’s Diamond Celebration. That piece has now evolved into a true gem.

The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.

It’s exactly a year since Ballet Nights, the self-styled taster platform for dance, started offering chirpily compered evenings of ballet and contemporary at venues where you'd least expect to find them. A first anniversary is already an achievement; to have arrived there bigger and better more so.

The story of Carmen is catnip to choreographers. No matter how many times this 180-year-old narrative has been tweaked and reframed in art, theatre, opera, dance and film, they keep coming back for more – which is curious when you consider that Carmen began life in a saucy French novella read in smoking rooms and gentlemen’s clubs.

Dance lovers have had a better time of it this year as the performance sector starts to find its feet again. In the wake of a general cull of independent dance companies, 2023 has seen signs of fresh growth.

The story of Edward Scissorhands may not seem an obvious Christmas subject, but it couldn’t be a more overt call for goodwill to all men. And there’s a hint of The Nutcracker about Matthew Bourne’s dance version, too.