Dance in 2008: Unearthing the joy of dancing in the streets

In contemporary dance it was a year for finding beauty in the unexpected. The first happy find was a mechanical digger in Transports Exceptionnels, a touchingly intimate duet for a man and a JCB which toured outdoor sites as part of the Dance Umbrella festival. The second was Toilet Tango (same festival), in which a couple enacted a steamy mini-drama on and around a bathroom suite at a branch of Bathstore, as incredulous shoppers pressed their noses to the window.

More conventional, but only because it took place in a theatre, was Reading Room, a piece choreographed by Jonathan Lunn to text by Anthony Minghella, whose untimely death just the week before the QEH performance gave it an unusual poignancy, especially since it used Minghella's recorded voice. Part of the piece was a duet accompanied by instructions for assembling flat-pack furniture. Of course, it was really a lasting relationship that the couple were trying to put together, and Minghella's Ikea-ish advice comically pointed up the emotional tendency to misalign.

The Royal Ballet played fairly safe in terms of not frightening the horses, but most of 2008's new works deserved to be kept in the rep. The most palpable hit was Wayne McGregor's Infra, a work that clearly challenged and delighted the dancers, who looked transformed by McGregor's slippery, flickering vocabulary, their fidgety limbs working so fast you began to think they must be on speeded-up film. The piece was also a triumph of collaboration. Too often big-name artists seem to be there merely to lend kudos, but Julian Opie's cast of moving neon pin-men and -women, marching in a constant stream across an imaginary footbridge, was beautifully integrated – poetic too.

Wooden clog award for most disappointing premiere

The baffling thing about Mark Morris's Romeo & Juliet, on Motifs of Shakespeare was not that the lovers lived happily ever after (as per Prokofiev's first draft of the ballet, vetoed by Stalin). It was that the production was so unengaging. While the orchestral score offered fascinating digressions from the familiar version, Tybalt's death-music prefiguring the stabbing strings of Hitchcock's Psycho, it found a signally leaden response in Morris's choreography. The balcony and bedroom duets – usually thought of as the best bits – fell especially flat.

Worst career decision

Whether they put it down to a misplaced sense of adventure, or their friends giving bad advice, it's a good guess that Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche have spent much of the past year regretting that they ever met, let alone that they agreed to trade skills. The inexplicably titled in-i was a car-crash of a show in which the Parisian actress and the Kathak supremo mused out loud on their romantic pasts, cuddled and cried. More embarrassing still was Binoche's dancing. Whoever allowed her to think she could acquire the skills of a lifetime in just a few months should be blacklisted.

Most enjoyable birthday party

Dance lives off its anniversaries. Brace yourself now for the onslaught of Ballets Russes centenary tributes in 2009. But no coming-of-age in 2008 was greeted more warmly than the 10th birthday of the new Sadler's Wells, whose revamp in 1998 didn't just improve the quality of the dance-going experience: it turned London into the dance capital of the world.

R.I.P.

Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Company, which has undergone more changes of direction than ought to be possible for a company with a pretty clear remit to appeal to a young, ethnically diverse audience, announced the abrupt departure of its latest boss. The flamboyant Javier De Frutos has clearly upset someone with his repertoire of lush, often homoerotic and highly unpredictable works. His recent one-acter based on a play by Tennessee Williams was in a class of its own. He'll reappear.

Meanwhile, ballet enthusiasts must brace themselves for the retirement of Agnes Oaks, whose impeccable stage partnership with husband, Thomas Edur, has made English National Ballet's productions look classier than they sometimes deserve. Catch them both in ENB's Manon, from next week, or book for Oaks's farewell gala at Sadler's Wells. Tears and cheers will be merited at both.