Marianela Nuñez curated a summer programme of Robbins, Ashton and classic divertissements, danced with colleagues from The Royal Ballet.
Marianela Nuñez, a principal of The Royal Ballet since 2002, curated and danced in her own programme at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It ran on the Main Stage from Wednesday 29 July to Sunday 2 August 2026.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1982, Nuñez entered the Teatro Colón Ballet School at six. She auditioned for The Royal Ballet at fifteen, trained at the Royal Ballet School and joined the company in 1998.
She won the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance in 2013. The five performances marked her 28 years with the company.
The programme opened with Jerome Robbins’s In the Night, to Chopin, with Kate Shipway at the piano. Nuñez danced it with Matthew Ball, beside Fumi Kaneko and Vadim Muntagirov, and Mayara Magri and Lukas B. Brændsrød.
Divertissements followed, among them Petipa’s Le Corsaire, McGregor’s Infra, Wheeldon’s After the Rain and Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux. Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, designed by Cecil Beaton to Liszt, closed each evening.
William Bracewell, Aiden O’Brien, Patricio Revé, Calvin Richardson, Mariko Sasaki and Akane Takada were among the colleagues who joined her across the run.