Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Jessica Lang

Iain Mackay is the best person to lead the Royal Ballet School into the future and presented a rich and diverse programme of legacy and new works.

The Royal Ballet School performing as part of the Next Generation Festival, offered a host of works by both students and internationally renowned choreographers which proved to be highly enjoyable.

It was a wonderful, heartening afternoon – it’s no wonder nearly all the 2025 graduates have gained contracts with several major ballet companies.

Overall, The Royal Ballet School delivers much to admire, but reminiscent of a multiple-course banquet that still leaves you reaching for the cheese and biscuits when you get home.

Four world premieres and four main stage debuts provides genuine hope for the future of choreography.

Not every Ashton work is a masterpiece, but Sarasota Ballet presents these Ashton works with such love and care, it ensures that even if the ballets won’t “keep”, they aren’t forgotten.

American Ballet Theatre shows its range with pieces from George Balanchine, Alonzo King, and Jessica Lang, but the dancing and choreography remain uneven throughout. 

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Rep 2 features an all-female choreographer program with world premieres by Penny Saunders and Jessica Lang and excerpts from the work of Twyla Tharp and Susan Marshall.

Pacific Northwest Ballet's Rep 1 delivers a magnificent first installment of their 2020-2021 virtual season.

A varied programme that failed to meet the highs of the company's opening night. 

Lang’s choreography lacks the hectic drollness and biting originality of Tharp’s, and while accessible it is also sweeter and blander.

Francesca Zambello's hip-hop graffiti staging of Aida comes to Seattle. 

An unlikely double bill of Mozart and Pergolesi at the Lincoln Center's White Light Festival. 

As a whole, this American Ballet Theatre program was good but the presence of Hee Seo and David Hallberg in Jerome Robbins' Other Dances made it indelible.

I can only regret the brevity of ABT's two week long fall season at Lincoln Center.

It can’t be easy to programme a Shakespeare season that has something new to say about this giant figure in a year of excellent productions up and down the country, but this programme achieves it. 

Emergence is certainly the draw in this program, but the other works are also worth admiring. 

Moving Stateside, a Programme which combined Serenade, by George Balanchine, Lyric Piece, a Jessica Lang work and Twyla Tharp's In The Upper Room, were gems from America that travelled across the Atlantic to be set on the ever evolving, risk taking, hard working Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Aiming to showcase “ballet for the 21st century”, a six-part program titled Ballet v6.0 has landed this August at New York’s preeminent dance venue, the Joyce Theatre. It has been said that one should not judge a book by its cover; conversely, I suppose, one should not judge a festival by one of its (six) performances.

The third production to launch this year at Glimmerglass Festival is a pairing of two one-act operas spanning four centuries, entitled Passions for expediency’s sake. Presented in one bill, the works couldn’t be more different in style, presentation, and audience appeal, but they ultimately combine to make a unique and important artistic statement about suffering and love.

Opposites Attract was the title chosen to tie three pieces together in Birmingham Royal Ballet’s first triple bill at Sadler’s Wells this week, but that was optimistic: these three were so different in both style and quality that it was hard to find any affinity between them, or any sense of the company as a whole.