We are bowled over! 

We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.

If modern and post-modern dance has a reputation for being earnest, then this latest curation of British and American pieces shows another face. For while there is rigour in Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s selection for her fine small company, there is also fun, colour and even louche behaviour. And for all the variety of moods and dynamics of these creations spanning 90 years, a silver thread connects them all.

No one divides opinion quite like Wayne McGregor, Sir Wayne since 2024. He’s the closest thing to Marmite on the ballet scene. Either you’re excited by the brave-new-world qualities of his work – the forefronting of science and new tech, the diminution of emotion, the physical contortions, legs up past the ears every two minutes – or it leaves you cold. 

“When it comes to a dance roundup, you surely won’t be able to come up with a Top Ten, will you? Even a Top Five might be a stretch”. This from a naysayer who clearly hasn’t been out much this past year. From where we stand, dance looks to have been doing rather well, and this despite the economic strictures we all know about.

Is there a neuroscientist in the house? I need a latterday Oliver Sacks to tell me about earworms, specifically earworms issuing from the music of Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. 

Filmmakers Powell and Pressburger were not the first to portray ballet dancing as a fatal obsession and choreographer Matthew Bourne won’t be the last, but the latter’s 2016 stage adaptation of The Red Shoes, Powell's 1948 film (now most famous as a favourite of Martin Scorsese), looks set for longevity nonetheless. Deftly invoking the postwar European dance scene and bringing sharp definition to the film’s plot and characters, the show brims with added entertaining detail.

The ballet world will soon run out of titles signifying a renaissance. After ENB’s recent Re:evolution comes London City Ballet’s Rebirth, following its debut programme last year called Resurgence. In LCB’s case, the term is quite literal.

As the new season opens, confidence is high at ENB, just as it should be given the roaring success of recent programmes featuring the latest work of iconoclast William Forsythe. His classical steps set to disco raised the roof.

Christopher Wheeldon has mined a new seam of narrative pieces for the Royal Ballet, having started out as a supreme practitioner of the abstract. After The Winter’s Tale and Alice in Wonderland, he landed in 2022 on the magical realist novel Like Water for Chocolate, set in Mexico at the turn of the 20th century. This for me is less successful than the other two.

It was the absence of performing animals that defined it in the 1980s, but contemporary circus has come a long way since. Cirque Éloize, a smallish touring company which started in Montreal in the late 90s, has so effectively dissolved the boundaries between dance, acrobatics and theatre that it performs around the world under any or all of those banners.