Derek Deane's in-the-round Swan Lake returns to the Royal Albert Hall from 16 to 27 June 2027, its thirtieth anniversary staging, with sixty swans and the audience on all four sides.
Derek Deane rebuilt Swan Lake for a circle in 1997. Every version before it had been made for a proscenium — an audience on one side, a painted lake at the back, and a corps arranged to be seen from the front — and the Royal Albert Hall has no front. So he restaged it for an arena: sixty swans instead of twenty-four, a cast of a hundred and twenty, entrances from every direction, and patterns designed to read from above and from all sides at once. It should not have worked. It has been revived at the Hall every few years since and has been seen by more than six hundred thousand people.
The scale changes what the ballet is. Twenty-four swans is a corps; sixty is a flock, and the second act stops being a formation and becomes weather. Deane was English National Ballet’s artistic director when he made it and built it to fill a hall the company could not otherwise afford to programme.
English National Ballet brings it back from Wednesday 16 to Sunday 27 June 2027, thirty years after the premiere, with the English National Ballet Philharmonic playing Tchaikovsky live from inside the hall. Twelve days is the whole London run. It falls in the middle of the Season, in the round building that is the most difficult room in London to stage anything in.