Ballet Central 2025 quad bill

★★★✰✰   Ballet Central’s 2025 tour features works by Frederick Ashton, Dickson Mbi, Kristen McNally and Thick & Tight…

Tara Darlami and Ballet Central in Dickson Mbi’s ‘Rise’. © Johan Persson.

Ballet Central
FEAST, Rise, Foyer de danse, Keeping Up with the Apocalypse
★★★✰✰
Salisbury, Salisbury Playhouse
4 June 2025
www.balletcentral.co.uk
Wiltshire Creative
Touring through to 17 July 2025

London’s Central School of Ballet is unique in having its final year students undertake a tour — under the title Ballet Central — where they learn the practical realities of what life in a dance company is really about. This has been their tradition for decades, and I usually find Central’s mix of eye-catching contemporary and classical work a good watch. This year’s show is no different, featuring three intriguing new commissions and an interesting reconstruction of an early Frederick Ashton work. This season, Central tour nine theatres and I caught them near the start at the Salisbury Playhouse. I’m glad I did because it’s a super comfortable venue with great legroom and sightlines.

The Royal Ballet’s Kristen McNally has been creating short, notably quirky works for many years. She has many fans (myself included) who see her fresh and spontaneous potential but are waiting for a breakthrough to another level of consequence and scale. FEAST¹, set to a custom score by Central’s Philip Feeney (playing live), shows McNally in semi-quirky mood, exploring how we present ourselves and how individuals bond and communities build. It’s for 17 dancers and I really liked the clever and serious way she shuffled and weaved lines, culminating in an almost Shaker-like spiritual celebration as the group came together and triumphed in life. The quirky side emerged in some whimsical stage entrances, at times resembling pecking chickens, and pairs of men unceremoniously carting their ballerina wards about as if they were a carpet or a dead tiger — most surreal. We also seemed to get what looked like a strangely distorted Wilis section from Giselle. At 10 minutes, FEAST feels like it ought to be longer, and the serious side could be extended. However, if it is extended, it should be in new costumes; the existing ones are perfectly hideous, shoddy affairs that do nobody any favours.

In Rise, Dickson Mbi also seeks to portray communities coming and working together, but here in a much more tribal and serious form. Mbi has evolved way beyond his hip-hop dance tradition, and this felt like a full-on contemporary work, with a vibe similar to his recently seen Twice-Born for Scottish Ballet. The atmosphere is gloomy and haze-filled, but it presents a fitting primal look, with dancers wriggling across the floor, face down — it really makes the stage sparkle with strange interest. Mbi also knows how to build circles of pulsing dance energy, emphasised by his own brooding electronic score with the volume turned up. Its 21 dancers are also flatteringly well-costumed in black by Chloe Ivey-Ray, who is responsible for costuming all the new works. Overall, Rise has serious magisterial grandeur and delivers it in short order — on the night, it was the best of the new works, and I liked it more than his Scottish piece.

Much of the marketing around this year’s tour focuses on Frederick Ashton’s Foyer de danse — not only a work by a revered British choreographer but also a visually striking piece, as it brings Degas’s much-loved ballerina pictures to life. Romantic tutus and colourful ribbons — what’s not to like? From 1932, it is a work long lost and has been reconstructed by Ursula Hageli. Jann Parry covered some of the efforts involved in a piece for DanceTabs in 2019. To a peppy score by Lord Berners (arranged mainly for piano by Central’s Philip Feeney, playing live again), Foyer initially presents a rather dull curved ball as a ballet master (Le Maître de ballet) and six coryphées do class around a bar before going on to practice poses, mainly in the style of Fokine’s Les Sylphides.

Things change with the arrival of L’Etoile, a principal ballerina in red, originally danced by Alicia Markova, who brings all her regal airs and graces. Ashton responds choreographically with steps that are much more fleet of foot, and the excitement takes off in various solos. Ashton himself was the original Maître, and he partnered Markova in some fleeting pas de deux, rapidly dispensed sketches almost — the movement clearly reflects his embryonic style, which he honed much more over subsequent decades in his many creations. Hannah Noh took the Markova role with much assurance and winning charisma — lucky is the company that grabs her. Joseph Burdett, taking the Ashton role, partnered well and achieved terrific elevation in his solos. But for all the fizz of the leads, it was a short section for three of the coryphées featuring blisteringly quick feet and little jumps that had me holding my breath in flabbergasted amazement — wow and bravo to them. At 16 minutes, Foyer de danse is a short but good bit of repertoire for the school and certainly an interesting curiosity for all Ashton lovers.

The evening closed with Thick & Tight‘s Keeping Up with the Apocalypse. It’s a bizarre work that explores a future where the entire species has become Kardashians, interested only in money and performing… if sadly for an audience that is no longer there. Dressed in striking wet-look and very tight black and gold bodysuits, they strut in unison and mime wholeheartedly to songs based on John Adams’ Nixon in China opera. Thick & Tight is the working title for the creatives Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry, who direct a company of the same name and create works that mix ‘dance, mime, theatre, satire and drag.’ We certainly see that on stage in a hail of self-centred greed — slickly danced as if it were a West End musical. It’s a blitzkrieg of silliness that actually prompts reflection on society and where we are headed based on our current preoccupations. We smile, but in reality we’ve been rather subversively mugged by the dynamic T&T duo. It rounds off a good and diverse night — Kate Coyne, who leads the school, should be very pleased, as should the students, who did a fine job. A talented bunch and I wish them well in their dance careers.