Review: American Ballet Theatre Studio Company opens the Next Generation Festival 2025

American Ballet Theatre’s Studio Company was a hit when it performed at The Royal Ballet’s Next Generation Festival in the Linbury Theatre a few years back, so hopes were high for the company’s return in 2025. Made up of recent graduate dancers aged between 17 and 22, the company offers the youngsters the opportunity to perform a range of works that include extracts from the great classical ballets, as well as American ‘heritage’ works and more modern pieces. It is an excellent showcase, but good as the 2025 dancers certainly are, I must confess to disappointment. The whole company are technically proficient, and the challenge of each work was well within their stride, but to me they seemed more like talented students than aspiring professionals.  

This was especially true of the accounts of the ‘Rose Adagio’ from The Sleeping Beauty and the ‘Black Swan‘ pas de deux from Swan Lake, both choreographed by Marius Petipa in the 1890s, in which the soloists danced everything required of them correctly, but often without much sense of individuality or nuance. Sooha Park held some strong and impressive balances in the Rose Adagio, and in the Black Swan, Yeonseo Choi, supported by Maximilian Catazaro, danced with amplitude and assurance, but these dances require so much more than mere technical display to make them really impressive. Still, at least these young women have now gained a firm foundation on which to develop their interpretation of these great ballerina roles should they be lucky enough to dance them in the future.

Of the “new works” on offer, the streamlined choreography of Houston Thomas’ U Don’t Know Me (danced to music by Arvo Pärt) could have been created any time in the past 50 years, but it allowed Choi and Park, as well as Kayla Mak, Max Barker, Elijah Geolina and Aaron Marquez to impress the audience with the calligraphic precision of their dancing. Brady Farrar’s Night Falls, a duet to music by Chopin, was a more emotional and romantic piece that demonstrated the warmth and humanity of Geolina and his partner, Paloma Livellara. Kayla Mak came into her own in Yannick Lebrun’s angsty solo Human.

At the start of the evening, Mak and Barker offered a spirited account of George Balanchine‘s tiresome Tarantella, which was followed by Natalie Steele and Catazaro in an evocation of the Romantic age of ballet in the pas de deux from Gerald Arpino’s Birthday Variations, and by Ptolemy Gidney, who showed off all his jumps and turns in Rostislav Zakharov’s Gopak. The best dancing, however, came right at the end of the evening in Jerome Robbins‘ Interplay, where the cast of eight responded dynamically to the wonderful invention and complexity of the choreography’s movements and steps, as well as its juicy, jazzy inflections. Here, at last, the company looked like seasoned professionals ready to bring the stage to life through dance.

Jonathan Gray Guest Author

Jonathan Gray was editor of Dancing Times from 2008 to 2022.

He studied at The Royal Ballet School, Leicester Polytechnic, and Wimbledon School of Art where he graduated with a BA Hons in Theatre Design. He was on the Curatorial Staff of the Theatre Museum, London, from 1989 to 2005, assisting on a number of dance-related exhibitions, and helping with the recreation of original designs for a number of The Royal Ballet’s productions including Danses concertantes, Daphnis and Chloë, and The Sleeping Beauty.

Jonathan Gray has also contributed to the Financial Times and The Guardian, written programme articles for The Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet, and is co-author of the book Unleashing Britain: Theatre gets real 1955-64, published in 2005. He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.