World Ballet Day returns on 29 October 2020 for a global celebration to unite the dance community as it faces the challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
World Ballet Day was launched in 2014 and now returns for its seventh year, showing the best of global dance and allowing audiences to go behind the scenes at The Australian Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet and The Royal Ballet. The full roster of participating companies will be announced later.
Each company will be streaming live rehearsals in accordance with their respective local COVID-19 guidance via their Facebook and YouTube pages as well as via Tencent video in China.
2019's World Ballet Day was the most successful year yet, with the event reaching 315 million social media users around the world.
As new COVID-19 guidelines come into place, the dance world is slowly beginning to return to the stage and this year's World Ballet Day will show how dance companies are responding to these new ways of rehearsing, working and performing.
Morning class in the UK this year will take place on the Royal Opera House stage. There will be interviews and access to rehearsals, as the company prepares for The Royal Ballet: Live, the first series of live performances for The Royal Ballet in seven months. The Australian Ballet will kick off the livestream (2am GMT) before passing the baton to the Bolshoi Ballet (7am GMT) and on to The Royal Ballet (11am to 3pm GMT).
A full schedule will be available via worldballetday.com.
Kevin O'Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet said,
Since 2014 World Ballet Day has proved a wonderful platform for connecting ballet lovers across the globe and now, more than ever, this digital celebration of dance promises to unite us all as we face new, shared challenges across the world.
We look forward to celebrating the incredible talents of all the international artists involved and bringing our art form to audiences who are missing live performance.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.
