Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal. Ah yes, always a talking point. “Of course,” remarked my companion on the first night of Bausch’s latest visit to Sadler’s Wells, “all the arty types are here.” For more than 30 years, her influence on European dance-theatre or “straight” theatre or film, has been huge – and not always a cause for gratitude, given her exasperating imitators. Among her works, I have been captivated by such anarchic, surreal yet poignant fantasies and spectaculars as 1980 or Nelken, which defy categorisation other than “pure Bauschian”. They are long, but Café Müller (1978), one of two seminal pieces shown for the first time in London, containing the kernel from which so much would grow, proved very resistible to me at 45 minutes.

Here, Bausch drew on childhood memories of the cafe her parents ran. It can’t have been the place for a peaceful snack – “Six go bonkers in an eaterie” might be the subtitle. There is no catering, as in several of her works. Here, the empty tables and chairs are to be bashed around tediously, just as the doors are to be slammed against or revolved in, by characters locked into the thrashings and crashings of tortured encounters. This is not one of Bausch’s pieces in which you get to know the dancers as individuals; her long-time performer Dominique Mercy, whose lugubrious, lived-in face I always looked forward to, now just looks older than the hills. I did engage with a woman who scurried distractedly in pitter-patter heels, because she reminded me of Hilda Ogden – but Bausch didn’t intend that.

The music is snippets from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, including When I Am Laid in Earth, which links us to Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975), in that this visceral interpretation is performed on a stage covered with peat; the 36 dancers kick, nuzzle or burrow in it, and it streaks their bodies. This is a different kind of “dance-theatre” – in fact, dance itself – shaped entirely by Stravinsky’s cataclysmic music and its tribal-sacrificial subject. So many (too many) choreographers have felt the need to pit their skills, or lack of them, against Rite that it has become a rite of passage for dance-makers. Bausch staked her claim to be one of the best.

Her deployment of the massed forces fascinates by its punch and its changes: the men and women first in separate groups, wary, then united in a circle, as if round a camp-fire – until threat takes over. They must pair off, but one woman will be the sacrifice – the one to wear the red dress. Several approach brutal-looking Andrey Berezin (the head man) in terror, but are safely ignored. When he grabs Ruth Amarante, we feel her shock – and see her face change into something prehistoric. Stabbing at herself, lunging at the semicircle of spectators, her dance of possession digs her into the earth until her death, face down. Powerful stuff.

At the Grand Theatre, Leeds, after the first half of David Nixon’s new production, Hamlet, premiered by Northern Ballet Theatre, a complete stranger made a beeline for me. “Hello – you look as if you know what’s going on.” I didn’t then: I hadn’t read the complicated synopsis – and you need to, even if you know the play. Who is who? What is real, or a memory, a flashback or a vision?

Nixon sets his ballet in German-occupied Paris of the 1940s, where Hamlet, a soldier returning from the front, finds his familiar world overtaken by Nazis and collaborators. This is a clever idea and staged with an effective sense of period, in fine sets and costumes by Christopher Giles (a former company dancer). The decor, based on movable stairs and balustrades, shifts us inside and out with the fluency of film dissolves – and Nixon’s treatment is, indeed, cinematic. Philip Feeney’s new score is a big success in driving the action, completely through-written, incorporating French and German cabaret songs as well as an out-and-out homage to Prokofiev’s Cinderella for the ballroom scene.

We have graphic sex and gory violence, and much athleticism in the choreography. Nixon’s pas de deux are inventive and expressive – one of his reliable characteristics. His effective big scenes include the dinner at which Christopher Hinton-Lewis’s subtle Hamlet taunts the guests with his “antic disposition”, and the ball when Georgina May’s touching Ophelia mesmerises the assembly with a hop-skip dance, while distributing a posy of swastikas. Nathalie Leger is compelling throughout as Gertrude. To end with flag-waving and the BBC’s “Here is the news . . . Paris has been liberated”, while Horatio is left lost in thought, struck me as something of a letdown.

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