Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan.

Consequently I have to short-change some of the highlights (note for next year’s diaries, folks — October is invariably the dance month of the year), including the liberation of ice-skating by the Canadians of Le Patin Libre, who made Alexandra Palace rink feel like a frozen field with their casual pyrotechnics (ice-o-technics?). And then there was the compellingly odd flamenco bailaora Rocio Molina, who set her surreal Barbican show in a forest and tottered about on white stilettos in a man’s shirt like a ladette the morning after the night before.

Dud of the fortnight was an overblown Royal Ballet studio creation hurling almost every balletic cliché and some weedy commissioned music at the subject of mental illness, Ludovic Ondiviela’s Cassandra.