I’ve had a bit of an epiphany. And it’s not me who has changed, it’s the arts world. Consider: I have attended three major arts events during the past month, and although wildly different on the surface, in fact they have something very central in common.

Let’s start with the opera. Mike Figgis’s new production of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at English National Opera attracted boos at the opening night (which, in some ways, felt like a rather fond throwback to the great days when David Poutney ran the show and productions that challenged and provoked in an intelligent way riled some and delighted others). The reason for the controversy was not the singing, which was fine and more than that in the case of Elizabeth DeShong – a thrilling new Italianate mezzo who might just be the answer to one of ENO’s "problem positions". It wasn’t the main parts of the staging, which were fairly traditional. It was the director’s decision to prefigure each act with longish films depicting Lucrezia’s earlier life, in which she was brutalised and possibly sexually abused by her brother and her father.

These were proper films, with proper actors, speech and their own scores with the film composer Ennio Morricone channeling Donizetti’s dark world. As a piece of art, almost a comment on the opera itself, it worked thrillingly. Lucrezia was given a depth that simply isn’t there in the libretto, and in fact the bustle of the films was in stark and surely deliberate contrast to the static nature of the opera scenes, which became variations on static tableaux (one of which even gave a nod to Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper) – until the final films themselves depicted the almost unmoving creation of classic paintings.

As drama, it was a failure. The extras were clearly grafted on to an opera that can’t structurally take that approach and which crucially requires the audience to be thrown headlong into its visceral emotions without taking the time to reflect on its superficialities. Yet what Figgis delivered wouldn’t have looked out of place – and I mean it no disservice really to say this – as a product of Tate Modern. It was just the wrong opera.

So now to the film Black Swan, the story of a ballerina’s increasingly twisted ambition to star in Swan Lake which I belatedly caught up with at my local cinema. This does everything right that Figgis got wrong, gradually twisting one art form into another, as what begins as a fairly conventional film assumes the melodramatic stakes and with them the whirling visual dynamism (not to mention the ever-more-powerful soundtrack, a clever riff of the Tchaikovsky) of ballet. Thus were two forms (at least) blended into something entirely new, but which used the best qualities of each.

Which experiences took me back another week or so, to the Sundance Film Festival. Interviewing Robert Redford for a project on which I was working, he told me earnestly that he believes that “fusion is the future”. Now, Redford knows a thing or two about the arts – he started his career as a painter, moved to stage and then screen acting and is now an immensely accomplished director. He cares and he thinks deeply about the arts, and his Sundance Institute nurtures not only film actors and directors, but also composers (both John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov have advised there) and for that matter stage professionals. So when he tells me in earnest that it is the merging of forms is the path ahead, I listen.

And I see for myself. The festival boasted a fascinating array of art installations which did just that, in its New Frontier programme. There was the display of DVDs, on each of which spun projections of the films they contained, in turn throwing hallucinatory colours on the opposite wall. Or the Bill T Jones 3D dance film where his haunting movements were part-animated to leave trails of light, becoming mazes through which he then, naturally and unforgettably, danced. And then I return to London to see Black Swan and Lucrezia. Fusion as the future? The future, it would seem, is here.