‘The dark heart of grief and loss’: Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s Betroffenheit. Photograph: Michael Slobodian

Luke Jennings: best dance of 2016

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Times were tough but inventive, with fine work from old hands and female dance-makers forcing change

Observer critics’ reviews of the year in full

This has been a year in which experience has told. The best work has come not from youthful next big things, but from seasoned creators. Akram Khan gave us Until the Lions and his reimagining of Giselle (for English National Ballet), both darkly resonant pieces. Cathy Marston’s Jane Eyre for Northern Ballet, Richard Alston’s An Italian in Madrid and Michael Clark’s to a simple, rock’n’roll… song represented very different genres of dance, but were all the result of rigorous and fine-tuned process. This was couture dance, cut back to its essence.

At the Edinburgh festival the choreographic stand-out was Janis Claxton’s small but beautifully formed Pop-Up Duets (Fragments of Love). Claxton has paid her dues, but like many female choreographers has had to fight harder for her chances than her less experienced male colleagues. The issue of equal gender representation in dance’s power roles gathered momentum in 2016. Classical ballet has for too long been deaf to this debate, but English National Ballet director Tamara Rojo’s female-crafted triple bill She Said, which included Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s vivid Broken Wings (about the life of the painter Frida Kahlo), was viewed as an encouraging statement of intent.

Janis Claxton’s Pop-Up Duets at the National Museum of Scotland. Photograph: Roy Campbell-Moore’.

Storytelling continued to be an issue. Mark Bruce’s The Odyssey made brave imaginative leaps while remaining true to the Homeric spirit; Wayne McGregor’s Obsidian Tear tantalised us with compelling whispers of narrative; Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young’s Betroffenheit led us into the dark heart of grief and loss. David Bintley’s handsome The Tempest, however, proved bafflingly convoluted, and Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein altogether missed the point of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel. While contemporary dance is sensitive to the changing currents and evolving spirit of today’s theatre, ballet – and especially story-ballet – all too often seems to hold itself aloof. It’s an attitude the art form can ill afford if it wants to win new audiences.

Funding anxieties, meanwhile, have forced many smaller-scale contemporary dance-makers to tighten their belts. Some of the sharpest-edged work is now happening in off-piste venues, with performers close enough to touch. Not an easy time, but an exciting one.