Fifteen years after her death and the shrine to Pina Bausch is still thick with incense and adulation. Whether one acknowledges her as a genius or not, there’s no doubt that her influence has been baneful – a cult that has spawned a thousand imitators, all following her absurdist idiom, all mesmerised by subversions of everyday logic, all ultimately trapped in a vacuous dead-end aesthetic in which anything goes, the weirder the better. ‘Nonsense, yes,’ cries the aesthetic Lady Saphir in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. ‘But oh! What precious nonsense!’

Never Known includes one of the most staggeringly virtuosic lifts I have seen outside the Bolshoi

Rejecting ballet for a theatrical expressionism that dug deep into the darkness of the psyche, Bausch’s creative process was based in asking her dancers questions about themselves, with the movement evolving from their answers, ‘never from the legs’.  The mood is confessional. A lot of memories, a lot of wails and shrieks, trances and silences, are incorporated into collages that run the gamut from slapdash farce to earnestly tragic. One can’t deny the almost religious dedication and panache with which a 16-strong company made up of confident personalities executes this ritual, but there can also be something frustrating and tedious about material so impermeably introspective, if not cabbalistic.

Nelken (Carnations) is one of Bausch’s most celebrated works, dating from 1982 and now immaculately revived by her heirs. On a platform stuck with thousands of (artificial, I hope) blooms, a lone man in a suit faces the audience and in sign language robotically mimes his response to Sophie Tucker singing ‘The Man I Love’. Then a woman in evening dress spoons mud over herself before collapsing into conniptions. And so on, and on. ‘It gives a superficial view of everything in society being beautiful – but actually it’s very controlled,’ according to a programme note. Later the dancers unite to form friezes, moving in mechanical unison, men in suits ask to see passports and guard dogs patrol the stage. Cardboard boxes assume some arcane symbolic significance. Members of the audience are randomly embraced. Precious nonsense, a profound statement of our alienation, or a museum piece preserved as the last gasp of experiments made during the Weimar Republic? Your guess is as good as mine.

The Royal Ballet is performing magnificently this season, even if the repertory isn’t particularly thrilling. What novelties there are have largely been concentrated into a brief Festival of New Choreography that, while enjoyable enough, is blandly unchallenging (although I should add that I missed Robert Binet’s intriguing installation in the Linbury Theatre).

Of the offerings that four newcomers presented in the main house, I felt Joshua Junker’s Never Known showed the most promise. It is indebted to Crystal Pite, perhaps, in its use of solid blocks of dancers but is also full of striking images imaginatively integrated with sound and light, as well as a full-blooded intensity of movement. It also includes one of the most staggeringly virtuosic lifts I have seen outside the Bolshoi, engineered without breaking a sweat by the Herculean Lukas B. Braendsrod.

Using Brahms’s ‘Wiegenlied’ and Mozart’s ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, maman’ variations as its score, Jessica Lang’s Twinkle curdled into cuteness at times but had beguiling wit and charm at others – and felt confidently crafted throughout. Inspired by the antics of her five-year-old daughter, Gemma Bond’s fast, fluent, and fun Boundless had plenty of playground energy: yet writing this merely hours after the curtain fell, I can barely remember anything specific about it except for the hideous costumes. And I can’t share several respected colleagues’ enthusiasm for Mthuthuzeli November’s For What it’s Worth: a homage to Mother Africa, full of kindly intentions, I’m sure, and enriched by the artistry of Mayara Magri, Leo Dixon and Joonhyuk Jun, but overall, pious kitsch for cultural tourists.