The Royal Ballet School’s (RBS) annual matinée at the Royal Ballet and Opera is a major event in the UK’s dance calendar. Not only does it give audiences (as well as proud parents) the opportunity to witness the young talent emerging from the UK’s leading vocational ballet school, but it also provides an indicator as to the quality of training the students receive at the RBS. This year was the first matinée given under the School’s new artistic director, Iain Mackay, a former principal with Birmingham Royal Ballet, and judging by the performance on the afternoon of 12 July, he is doing a fantastic job. It was, quite simply, the best RBS performance I have seen in years.
The repertoire chosen for the performance reflected both Royal Ballet tradition and upcoming talent. The afternoon opened with a superb account of Marius Petipa’s Aurora’s Wedding, a series of divertissements staged by Anthony Dowell and drawn from the Prologue and Act III of The Sleeping Beauty. The complete Beauty is central to The Royal Ballet’s repertoire, and it was thrilling to see how these young dancers completely mastered the nuance and style of the difficult choreography and even restored several textual details that have begun to disappear in recent years.
There were accomplished, characterful accounts of the “Fairy” variations from Krista Vaitkeviciute, Chiyo Kameda, Heewon Moon, Alecsia Maria Lazarescu, Samantha Striplin and Lilysophia Dashwood, and Amos Child and Yasemin Kayabay were superb in the “Blue Bird” pas de deux. I understand the School wanted to show off as many talented students as it possibly could that afternoon, but I thought it a shame that Child and Kayabay, with their beautiful footwork and ebullience, didn’t get the opportunity to perform their individual solos – that honour went instead to Yusuke Otake and Sophia Koo.
Aurora’s Wedding was led by a real Aurora – Aurora Chinchilla, partnered by Joe Parkinson. The pair were confident and relaxed as Princess Aurora and Prince Florimund in the Grand pas de deux, which was an opportunity for Chinchilla to display her impressive balances. In addition, Fabrizzio Ulloa Cornejo danced a sensational Florimund solo complete with faultless tours en l’air.
After the interval came Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, another gem from The Royal Ballet’s repertoire, which was beautifully staged for the RBS by Vanessa Palmer. Again, the students captured the exquisite style of the ballet exactly, emphasising especially the sliding movements suggestive of ice skating, as well as the choreography’s innate sense of charm and fun. It’s a difficult ballet, too, and testament to how brilliant the original dancers were when Les Patineurs was first performed in 1937.
As the Blue Boy, Wendel Viera Teles Dos Santos was a little tense in his opening solo, but soon relaxed to give an exciting, virtuoso performance, thrilling in his spins and turns. He was joined by the piquant Chiyo Kameda and Yuki Nagayasu in the pas de trois. On a personal note, when I was a student at the RBS briefly, way back in 1979, I remember watching fellow students being taught dances from both The Sleeping Beauty and Les Patineurs, so it was nice to see how that continuity of tradition is being kept very much alive.
The last section of the performance was given over to shorter works, all choreographed by women. Ruth Brill provided a delightful Garden Suite, populated by a huge ensemble of Ants, Grasshoppers, Bees, Ladybirds, Spiders, Flowers and Bugs, for the students at the Junior School. More generic ensemble works from Jessica Lang (Sweet Morning Blooms) and Hannah Joseph (Gridlock) followed, which showed the young dancers performing immaculately in a variety of choreographic styles, and then came Iva Lesić’s almost comical Tracks Uniting, a wry and quirky take on national dances that had the students slapping their thighs, tapping their feet and working in complex movement patterns.
This was followed by Arielle Smith’s wonderfully entertaining Culmination, a jazzy, irreverent work danced to irresistible music by Quincey Jones. Culmination somehow managed to capture the spirit of 1960s social dancing, which the dancers relished, and it provided a star turn for Matteo Curley-Bynoe, whose winning personality and buoyant dancing immediately captured the eye.
Finally, we came to the moment almost everyone in the audience looks forward to most of all – the Grand Défilé that brings every pupil on to the stage and gives individual dancers, like Curley-Bynoe, one last chance to make the audience gasp at their pyrotechnics. Gasp they did, followed by huge roars of approval and a standing ovation. It was a wonderful, heartening afternoon – it’s no wonder nearly all the 2025 graduates have gained contracts with several major ballet companies. I wish good luck to them all.
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