thu 10/04/2025

Royal Ballet

Romeo and Juliet in Opera and Ballet

Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National...

Read more...

Onegin, Royal Ballet

One gin is not enough, not two, or even three gins, to make me susceptible to the idea that John Cranko’s ballet Onegin is anything more than a second-league costume drama with a peachy ballerina role in the middle. But it’s box office, and with...

Read more...

My Summer Reading: Ballerina Tamara Rojo

In the first of a short summer series in which artists and performers tell theartsdesk about what they're reading, ballerina Tamara Rojo talks about the books she's taken with her on holiday, and what she's enjoyed reading. We run short...

Read more...

Q&A Special: Choreographer Slava Samodurov

Slava Samodurov: 'Choreography doesn't have laws so far. It's a more unstable and free creative art'

Choreography is a mystery art. How it happens - or indeed what happens - is as elusive to define as pinning down a brainstorm. There is no solid stuff, no rules, no pre-formed maxims, everything moves; the choreographer goes into a studio, finds...

Read more...

Royal Ballet School Matinee, Royal Opera House

The annual tradition that is the Royal Ballet School Matinee at Covent Garden isn’t just some prestige indulgence for the nervous parents of ballet children fortunate enough to survive the militaristic training and dogged enough to want to continue...

Read more...

Two ballerinas retire - how grateful are we?

Two leading ballerinas retired this week on either side of the Atlantic, Darci Kistler of New York City Ballet and Miyako Yoshida of the Royal Ballet. Both are in their mid-forties (not old for a ballerina) and each is an exemplar of certain best...

Read more...

A starlet no longer - now Sergei is to be Covent Garden's new star

A new male star will be leading the Royal Ballet next season - a prodigious in-house talent of just 20. Sergei Polunin, Ukrainian-born and Royal Ballet School-trained, has been elevated to top rank in the Royal Ballet’s end-of-year promotions after...

Read more...

Royal Ballet New Works, Linbury Studio Theatre, ROH

Inspired by Balanchine: Melissa Hamilton and Valeri Hristov in Viacheslav Samodurov's fine Trip Trac

Ninette de Valois said the solution to a shortage of choreographic talent was this: “You wait.” Waiting through the Nineties and early Noughties proved the Royal Ballet founder’s point - suddenly new distinctive ballet talent is cropping up all over...

Read more...

Chroma/ Tryst/ Symphony in C, Royal Ballet

A Balanchine on a mixed bill is a reminder of what a choreographer should desire to offer his audience: a specific new experience of art each time,  not a repeated thumbprint in every ballet. Balanchine grew up in a borderless theatre country...

Read more...

Classical ballet and recorders?

White Lodge, the Royal Ballet School's junior wing: now undergoing a £22 million redevelopment

The recorder is indelibly associated with school and dreaded first music classes, but the association will be on a considerably higher plane on 21 June when the world recorder star Michala Petri combines with the Royal Ballet School for a one-off...

Read more...

Production Gallery: The Royal Ballet's Asphodel Meadows

Johan Persson took the photographs for The Royal Ballet's world premiere of Liam Scarlett's Asphodel Meadows, which opened on 5 May 2010. Read theartsdesk's review of the ballet here.The music is Francis Poulenc's 1932 Concerto for Two Pianos;...

Read more...

Electric Counterpoint/ Asphodel Meadows/ Carmen, Royal Ballet

Wonder of wonders - a really cracking triple bill at the Royal Ballet last night. The best of the year, by a country mile, and probably the best for several years: a top-notch beauty from Christopher Wheeldon, the love-it-or-loathe-it Marmite of...

Read more...
Subscribe to Royal Ballet