Venue: Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London

National Ballet of Japan offer a 21st-century remake of this 19th-century Romantic classic with impeccable performances.

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

Superb Handelian singing and intense character acting light up Handel’s Semele, staged as a stark, uncompromising indictment of the rich and powerful. 

English National Ballet School and Rambert School present a diverse and entertaining programme for the Next Generation Festival.

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.

A very welcome visit from the Paris Opera Junior Ballet to the Linbury Theatre displays the company in a very favourable light, in a variety of works.

Ballet Central provides an extremely varied programme of new and old, classical and contemporary dance, with plenty of aplomb.

Christopher Wheeldon's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland shows off The Royal Ballet's roster of supreme dance actors in every version of technical wizardry and comic incarnation.