International Draft Works brings new choreography to the Linbury Theatre from 12 to 14 April 2027.
Every ballet company faces the same difficulty: choreographers are made by being given dancers and a room, and almost nobody will risk a main stage on someone untested. The Royal Ballet’s answer is a set of workshop strands, and International Draft Works is the outward-facing one — new pieces by choreographers from other companies and other countries, made on Royal Ballet dancers, shown once each.
Draft is the operative word. These are not finished works and are not presented as any, which is a rare and useful thing for an audience to see: the point at which an idea is still visibly an idea. The Royal Ballet has run the strand for over a decade and several of its resident and associate choreographers were first seen in it, so the ticket buys an early look rather than a finished evening.
It is given in the Linbury Theatre from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 April 2027, three nights, each piece performed once. Tickets for these evenings are among the cheapest the Royal Opera House sells and the room holds four hundred, so the audience is dancers, choreographers and the small number of people who have worked out that this is where the next decade of the repertoire is being decided. A good many of the works that later appear on the Main Stage started in a programme like this one.