Civilisation has never nurtured more than a handful of front-rank choreographers within any one generation, with the undesirable result that the chosen few end up excessively in demand, careering around the globe and overworking, delegating or repeating themselves. Please can someone up there ensure that Pam Tanowitz doesn’t suffer such a fate. This fifty-something American has recently matured as one of the best in field, producing dance of rigorous clarity, austere yet richly nuanced, that makes the work of certain other big names look fuzzily derivative or gimmicky. Just don’t ask too much of her, because she works through fine detail, not a broad brush.

An hour-long programme of her creations for the Royal Ballet, presented in the intimate environment of the Linbury Theatre, proved deeply rewarding and absorbing. True, the revival of 2019’s Everyone Keeps Me looked a little under-rehearsed. Nine young dancers, focusing hard to get it right, didn’t quite capture its mood of playful, teasing, almost pastoral friendliness (Robbins’s Dances at a Gathering a point of reference?), but when nerves have settled its full beauty will surely emerge.

Secret Things is the novelty, set to an intensely Beethovenian string quartet by Anna Clyne. The gorgeously coloured costumes designed by Victoria Bartlett are ancient Greek chitons with greaves around the calves: do these eight dancers represent Amazons gathered on an Olympian plain? The bare stage gives no clue.

Hannah Grennell (wonderful) opens with a long solo, hesitant and fragmented, as though she is uncertain of her body’s power and what she is meant to do with it. As others more confidently emerge, symmetries are set up only to be disintegrated, with movement not so much a prelude to action as evidence of unease. There’s no contortion, no virtuosity, no overt emotion. Is this simply a response to the music or an allegory of sorts? A strange final image sees Grennell change her costume and a lone male, Liam Boswell, sauntering into the wings to answer a whistling summons. Tanowitz leaves us to make our own interpretations, or none.

As an interlude came a witty film of the scorching Dispatch Duet, first seen last November on the main stage, taking William Bracewell and Anna Rose O’Sullivan on a breakneck journey round the opera house, dancing off stage in sparky competition, on stairs and in foyers and passages before vanishing into a lift. It’s a firecracker. And Tanowitz, let me repeat, is the real, rare thing: no concept, no plots, no claptrap. One just hopes she doesn’t become the victim of her own success.

Carlos Acosta doubles his job directing Birmingham Royal Ballet with a commitment to his native Cuba, where he has established Acosta Danza, a small company devoted to contemporary work that complements Havana’s classically based Ballet Nacional.

Its most recent visit to London last month demonstrated the extraordinary vitality of its performers – a troupe of beautiful creatures projecting an unstinting sensuality as well as technical strength. The quality of what they danced, however, was variable.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun mixes Debussy’s lush Après-midi prelude with refracting music by Nitin Sawhney as it moves away from the whimsy of ancient Greek pastoral myth to suggest a jungle mating between amoral wild animals. The result is a hungry, predatory copulation, thrillingly enacted by Yasser Dominguez and Patricia Torres, and it rather eclipsed everything else in the programme. Best of the rest was Goyo Montero’s Alrededor no hay nada (‘There is nothing around’), in which spoken poems by Joaquin Sabina provide the soundtrack and there’s an alluring whiff of Havana sleaze to the movement. But contributions from Juanjo Arques, Micaela Taylor, Beatriz Garcia and Raul Reinoso seemed either pretentious or formulaic or both.