Are the best young ballerinas being lured away from dance by sport?

As graduation ceremonies go, the Royal Ballet School’s annual matinée ranks among the most spectacular. It takes place at the Royal Opera House in front of an adoring parental audience, and although it serves primarily as a showcase for those passing out into the profession, it also contains spots for all 250 or so pupils, ranging in age from 11 to 19 and globally recruited, culminating in a glorious parade (called the défilé) of the entire establishment, drilled with a precision that reminds one of ballet’s miliary roots.

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Sean Thomas

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This year Christopher Powney, the school’s artistic director for the past decade, hands over to Iain Mackay, formerly a principal at Birmingham Royal Ballet. His was a tricky job, given the many fiercely contested views as to how dancers should be educated as well as trained, but Mackay inherits a strong organisation. Powney seems to have steered a less divisive course than his predecessors Gailene Stock and Merle Park, whose polices did not always please the Royal Ballet, for which the school is a vital feeder. His final harvest was presented in an excellent programme that demonstrated the breadth of the RBS curriculum, ranging from St Petersburg classicism and Balkan folk dancing to barefoot modernism and Pina Bauschian absurdity. Ballet technique is at the core, but more interesting performers will develop if there’s freedom to range over all the possibilities of moving to music.

That being said, I felt overall that the boys showed more confidence and individuality than the girls. There’s an issue in the hinterland here, and my guess is that it doesn’t relate to the rumblings about eating disorders and fat-shaming that the tabloids periodically sensationalise. A generation ago, ballet was one of relatively few avenues open to girls with physical energy, but now that all team sports are wide open to women, the allure of becoming a prima ballerina has diminished as the possibility of becoming a Lioness has increased. Boys who want to dance, meanwhile, have benefited from the Billy Elliot effect and the demise of stigmas and prejudices around ‘sissiness’. (I have long wanted to explore the demographics and statistics relevant to this, but neither the Royal Ballet School nor the Royal Academy of Dance have responded to requests for comment.) 

Excerpts from Petipa’s Paquita opened the matinée and produced all its best classical dancing. With his elegantly reticent manner and assured partnering skills, Ravi Cannonier-Watson proved himself a danseur noble of high style; Emile Gooding’s smoothly executed jumps and turns suggested a virtuoso in the making; and Alejandro Munoz showed engagingly natural charm and musicality. Among the young women, Rebecca Myles Stewart stood out for her dazzling smile and scintillating energy – unlike her more cautious fellows, she goes for broke, giving it everything she’s got and then a bit more.

These four have been snapped up by the Royal Ballet, which is entitled to first pickings of the crop, but all 25 members of the school’s final year have a professional contract with a major company. Of course not everyone makes it thus far – adolescent bodies grow inconveniently and only an elite of the truly dedicated can take the pressure. For most, a career in ballet remains a dream; for some, it ends up a bitter disappointment, too.

Highlights of the remainder of the programme included TooT, Didy Veldman’s slyly amusing satire of ballet-class discipline, and Remembrance, a darkly coloured elegy intensely imagined by Joshua Junker. From the more mainstream repertory, Ashton’s La Valse had grace and glamour, but Ashley Page’s Fieldwork was a mess and Helgi Tomasson’s Concerto Grosso lacked lustre. A final word of congratulation to the Royal Opera House’s backstage team, for producing a complex show at short notice that went without a technical hitch.