Currently midway through an elements-themed four-year cycle, Greenwich + Docklands specialises in excellently located large-scale spectacles. A lot of these are keyed into the sort of aesthetic you maybe get at a big opening ceremony – wire work, projections, panoramas, historic buildings (the festival regularly accesses the interior square of Greenwich's Old Royal Naval College). It's perhaps not on the mark to call this strand of G+D shallow, but it's robust, broad work made for immense, and sometimes distant, audiences.

Preceding these larger performances, which are usually scheduled for dusk or just after, the festival days are taken up by smaller work. Over in Greenwich Park and Cutty Sark Gardens, and up at the beautiful Royal Observatory, the programming favours the curious and the site-responsive, low-key pieces that sort of slot in, while in Canary Wharf the one-day mini-festival Dancing City has more volume and bombast.