The long list for my top 10 shows of 2012 numbered more than 20 – a pretty good indication of a strong year in the arts. So why restrict myself to 10? No point really, so here are the shows that worked for me last year:

At the Sydney Festival: Babel (Words), a wild dance-theatre ride from choreographers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet; Griffin Theatre Company’s searing production of Gordon Graham’s The Boys, directed with frighteningly effective violence by Sam Strong; The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, making a welcome Sydney appearance after rocking Melbourne; and the superb I’m Your Man at Belvoir, verbatim theatre about boxing by Roslyn Oades with an authentic whiff of sweat.

In other theatre, Lee Lewis’s spot-on direction made Bell Shakespeare’s School for Wives a delight from start to finish. At Belvoir, Kate Mulvaney and Anne-Louise Sarks’s version of Medea, directed by Sarks, was a triumph. The audacity of the approach – the play is seen from the perspective of the little boys who have no idea what is coming – and superb performances from its two young actors made it one of the year’s absolute best. The final show of the year (and it’s sort of the first production of 2013) came with Sport for Jove’s terrific Shakespeare festival, and you can see my review below.

In the pure dance arena, the first whammy of the year came at the Perth International Arts Festival with American legend Lucinda Childs’s Dance; one of the most intricate, delicate, mesmerising, atmospheric, bloody difficult pieces you’re ever likely to see. Sydney Opera House’s Spring Dance festival, curated by Sydney Dance Company’s Rafael Bonachela, scored a big hit with Tao Dance Theatre, another demonstration of how apparently minimal means can imply so much.

Also in dance, retiring Australian Ballet principal artist Rachel Rawlins was exquisite in her final performance for the company, as Odette/Odile in the new Stephen Baynes Swan Lake. The torment of Odette’s situation and her desperate need for love’s saving grace have never been more clearly articulated or more moving.

On the opera front Opera Australia’s Lyndon Terracini became a metaphorical rainmaker and a literal rain stopper when Sydney’s weather somehow turned obedient for Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. La traviata somehow simultaneously offered intimacy and grand spectacle against one of the most astonishing backdrops anywhere in the world, and threw in Emma Matthews’s gorgeous Violetta too. Matthews backed up with a stellar Lucia in the new John Doyle Lucia di Lammermoor for OA. Its austerity didn’t appeal to those who like a bit of bling to go with their big night out, but Doyle put the performers and the music above all else with stunning results.

Sydney Symphony showed that a big orchestra, huge chorus and a group of top-flight singers can take an audience places that elude many opera productions. The concert performance of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades was outstanding.

I liked Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Phantom of the Opera sequel Love Never Dies more than many – it had everything but a truly convincing story. Top-notch in all departments was South Pacific, the Lincoln Centre production mounted by Opera Australia to huge acclaim and monster box office (and a hugely welcome alternative to Gilbert & Sullivan). South Pacific went so well it gets a return season in Sydney this year. Another instance of Terracini rain-making. A much smaller piece of music theatre – cabaret really – grabbed my attention earlier in the year. Christie Whelan’s portrayal of troubled songstress Britney Spears in Britney Spears: The Cabaret was remarkable for its wit, insight and sensitivity. Not all audiences were in tune with the show’s vein of melancholy and saw it as a send-up. It was much more than that.

Synaesthesia, the music festival staged at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, was extraordinarily stimulating. Involving talents as disparate as Brian Ritchie, David Walsh and Lyndon Terracini (yes, him again), Synaesthesia presented a wide array of music inside MONA, which proved to have wonderfully spacious and sympathetic acoustics. A real winner.

Looking offshore, in New York superstars David Hallberg and Natalia Osipova danced Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet for American Ballet Theatre and, at the performance I saw, had to come out for an ovation after the first act so vociferous was the audience demand; later in the year Royal New Zealand Ballet staged Giselle in a new, beautifully lucid production from the hands of RNZB artistic director Ethan Stiefel and Royal Ballet star Johan Kobborg.

And in 2013 …

Frequent Flyer points at the ready, I am greatly looking forward to (in no particular order):

Dance: Sacre, Sydney Festival, Paris Opera Ballet’s Giselle (Sydney), Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev in Don Quixote for the Australian Ballet (Melbourne only), The Bolshoi Ballet with Le Corsaire and The Bright Stream (Brisbane), Alexei Ratmansky’s new Cinderella for the Australian Ballet (Melbourne and Sydney), West Australian Ballet’s Onegin (Perth)

Theatre: The Threepenny Opera from the Berliner Ensemble, Perth Festival, One Man, Two Guvnors (Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne),Elevator Repair Service’s The Select (The Sun Also Rises), Ten Days on the Island festival (Hobart), Angels in America Parts One and Two, Belvoir (Sydney), The Maids, with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, Sydney Theatre Company, Venus in Fur, Queensland Theatre Company (Brisbane), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Tim Minchin and Toby Schmitz, STC (Sydney), The Cherry Orchard with Pamela Rabe, Melbourne Theatre Company, Waiting for Godot with Hugo Weaving and Richard Roxburgh, STC (Sydney)

Opera: Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour’s Carmen, (Sydney), A Masked Ball, in a La Fura dels Baus production, Opera Australia (Sydney, Melbourne), Sunday in the Park with George, Victorian Opera (Melbourne), The Flying Dutchman in Concert, Sydney Symphony, The Ring Cycle, if I can get my hands on a ticket (Melbourne)

Exhibitions: Turner from the Tate – The Making of a Master, Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), The 7^th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane)