Derek Deane rebuilt Swan Lake for the round in 1997, and English National Ballet brings his sixty-swan staging back to the Royal Albert Hall.
English National Ballet brings Derek Deane’s Swan Lake in-the-round back to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington from Wednesday 16 June to Sunday 27 June 2027.
Deane made the staging in 1997, when he was the company’s artistic director. Every earlier version had been made for a proscenium. The audience sat on one side, a painted lake hung at the back, and the corps was arranged to be seen from the front.
The Royal Albert Hall was built as a concert hall rather than a theatre, and it has no front. Deane restaged the ballet for the arena, with 60 swans rather than 24 and a cast of 120.
Dancers enter from every direction, and the patterns are designed to read from above and from all sides at once. At that scale the corps of the second act becomes a flock.
Deane built the production to fill a hall the company could not otherwise afford to programme. It has been revived at the Hall every few years since and has been seen by more than 600,000 people.
The English National Ballet Philharmonic plays Tchaikovsky’s score live from inside the hall.