The Royal Ballet gives four contemporary works on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from 6 to 25 May 2027.
The Royal Ballet’s problem, and every classical company’s, is that the repertoire it exists to preserve was made between 1870 and 1970, and a company that only preserves becomes a museum. The answer is programmes like this: four contemporary works in one evening on the Main Stage, in the house built for Swan Lake.
The four are chosen to disagree with each other. Pam Tanowitz uses ballet’s vocabulary and throws away its narrative habits. Joshua Junker came up through this company’s own school and is the youngest voice on the bill. Akram Khan works from kathak, the north Indian classical form, and has spent twenty years demonstrating that it and ballet can be in the same body. Wayne McGregor has been the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer since 2006 and bends dancers into shapes their training was designed to prevent. Junker is the one to watch on the bill, because a dancer choreographing on the company that trained him is the oldest route into the job and the least common one now.
It runs on the Main Stage from Thursday 6 to Tuesday 25 May 2027 and is the only all-contemporary Main Stage programme in the company’s year. Selling three weeks of new choreography in a two-thousand-seat opera house is harder than selling Swan Lake, which is exactly why it is worth going: this is the company arguing for its own future in public.