Royal Ballet announces October comeback with 100 dancers

One of the largest dance performances to happen anywhere in the world since the coronavirus pandemic began has been announced featuring the full company of the Royal Ballet – and while it will be socially distanced, there will be dance duets thanks to couples in bubbles.

The company has revealed ambitious details of its “comeback” after a seven-month break from full performances on the Covent Garden stage. The plan is for a celebration performance with 100 dancers and a full orchestra on 9 October, livestreamed around the world.

Pieces have been chosen that accommodate distanced dancing but it would not have been the same without the intimacy of duets, or pas de deux, according to the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare.

The company already has three real-life couples in the shape of Mayara Magri and Matthew Ball, Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales, and Fumi Kaneko and Reece Clarke. It has created seven more bubbles to allow close contact including the superstar pairing of Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Other pairs include Sarah Lamb and Ryoichi Hirano; Yasmine Naghdi and Nicol Edmonds; and Akane Takada and Federico Bonelli.

“Emotionally, it feels extraordinary to be returning,” O’Hare told the Guardian. “We have to be on stage. It is all about performing on stage as a company, there is nothing greater to us than that … to be there as one. People are feeling quite emotional about it and are desperate for it to happen.”

The full company has not performed at Covent Garden since Swan Lake in March. “That’s a day etched into my brain,” he says. “Even though the government hadn’t announced [it], we all knew it would be the last performance. The audience knew it as well and they were all standing and cheering like they didn’t want us to leave. It was extraordinary.”

Dancers were furloughed and did their best to remain creative and fit until their return to work in July. But it was so strange, says O’Hare, because they would never have had such a long time off. “No ballet dancer ever has a gap year or any sort of break. You start at a vocational school and then you’re into a company and then it’s a constant whirl really.”

Since their return, daily classes and rehearsals have been broken up into smaller groups and masks worn, says O’Hare. “Everyone cleans their own barre, they do their exercise and they leave. It’s been as if they were going into Waitrose. We are finding things out we never knew – such as the way the air works in our studios – and we are having cleaners in all the time.”

O’Hare says the performance will be a reflection of the company’s wide repertoire. “We have one of the biggest repertoires in the world, everything from Swan Lake to Woolf Works and everything in between.”

The plan is to perform classic pieces by choreographers including Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and George Balanchine. Contemporary highlights will include work by Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon, Cathy Marston, Hofesh Shechter and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui.

The two-and-a-half-hour evening will finish with double the usual number of dancers in MacMillan’s feelgood showstopper Elite Syncopations.

The event will be broadcast via Vimeo at £16 per household and will be available for 30 days. “We have to charge, we have had no ticket income,” says O’Hare. “I would say £16 is a real bargain … to have every principal of the Royal Ballet, the rest of the company and the orchestra, it will be extraordinary.”

Unless the rules change, there will be a specially invited and socially distanced audience that will include students and health workers. The Royal Opera House also hopes the “Back on Stage” event will prove to be a useful and educative pilot on the road back to public performances.

The arts world is increasingly turning to streaming as a way of generating income and remaining creative. The Old Vic in particular has led the way with live streams of Lungs, with Matt Smith and Claire Foy; Three Kings with Andrew Scott; and most recently Brian Friel’s Faith Healer.

The Royal Opera House broadcast a concert live from its stage, with no audience, earlier this month, and the English National Opera this week began a series of drive-in performances at Alexandra Palace.

Having the entire Royal Ballet company performing – although not at the same time – will be an enormous logistical challenge, but exciting, says O’Hare.

“I really do feel it will be a night to remember. There have been a few of those for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden in its history … when we opened again after the war, reopening after the redevelopment in 1999. This is right up there with those.

“It is so important to be on that stage, to see the dancers where they belong and to see them with freedom of space. That is what the dancers have missed most, the freedom of space.”