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Rambert is celebrating its first 100 years with a triple bill that emphasises the youthful vitality of the company. “We’re 100, and we’re just getting started,” they enthusiastically declare. “The next century starts here.”
 
Like many of the best things in Britain, our first dance company was set up by an immigrant – a Polish woman dedicated both to dancing and promoting others. On leaving Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes where she’d danced with Nijinsky, Marie Rambert came to this country in 1914.

The finale of the Royal Ballet’s 2025-26 programming is an extraordinary sight. At the curtain call for Salle de danse, a world premiere from Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, there are so many dancers taking a bow that they have to take turns to come forward, in two different rows, each as wide as the stage. That’s before the conductor and creatives join them.

South Korea’s soft power isn’t restricted to K-pop and K-drama. The latest Festival of Korean Dance, hosted by venues around the UK, is a demonstration that its contemporary dance scene is impressive too.

Now in its ninth iteration, this year I caught two of the festival’s programmes, one indie, the other by the Korea National Contemporary Dance Company, who presented a piece on a double bill that was so good, I returned the next night to catch it again.

Former Royal Ballet principal Federico Bonelli has brought his Northern Ballet company south in the latest of its trademark narrative ballets. His dancers are a huge credit to him, but I wish they were appearing in a more challenging piece.

Contrast and variety are as vital in a three-ballet programme as in a well-built sandwich. Typically that might include textural interest, a spicy element and something substantial in the middle. Alchemies, the Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill, ignored that time-tested formula with the result that not one of the three works by Wayne McGregor registered as strongly as it should.

If it were true, as Timothée Chalamet has said, that ballet as an art form has become a museum, the job of running a national ballet company would be easy. Ballet never ceases to evolve, and to prove the point I’d be happy to offer the actor my plus-one on any night of his choosing, if only he’d return my calls.

Search “black ballerinas” online and you will be offered shoes, which doesn’t say much for the racial diversity of classical dance in today’s Britain. Black male dancers, even at principal level, are not doing badly, and there has been the odd breakthrough for their female counterparts, with Birmingham Royal Ballet leading the way.

Visual artists gave up on titles long ago, resorting to neutral labels such as Untitled. Choreographers still feel bound to tag their works descriptively, which can be a challenge if the dance is about everything or nothing.

In 2007, Pina Bausch was preparing her company’s latest “city piece”, this one based on a visit to Kolkotta. But she was also brewing up something special, a work for six of her long-serving women dancers, created separately from the city piece but out of the same set of questions.