London City Ballet returns to the Linbury Theatre from 28 April to 2 May 2027.
London City Ballet was founded in 1978, spent the 1980s as the company Diana, Princess of Wales attached her name to as patron, toured relentlessly to places that had no ballet, and then ran out of money and closed in 1996. It was a fixture of British dance for eighteen years and then it was not, and the dancers scattered.
Christopher Marney re-founded it in 2024. The model is the old one: a small company, no permanent theatre, a repertoire built from rediscovered twentieth-century work alongside new commissions, and a touring pattern that reaches towns the big companies do not visit. Reviving a defunct ballet company from nothing is close to unheard of, and the interesting part is that it has worked.
It returns to the Linbury Theatre from Wednesday 28 April to Sunday 2 May 2027, five days, programmed by the Royal Opera House between its own International Draft Works and Disruptors. A house of Covent Garden’s size giving its studio theatre to an independent company for a week is a real endorsement rather than a courtesy, and for a reader who has only seen ballet at the big houses it is a chance to watch the form at the scale most of it is actually made at. Tickets are a fraction of a Main Stage seat. Tickets are a fraction of a Main Stage seat, and the room holds four hundred.