Review: Ballet Nights, New Futures – the opportunity to compare and contrast
Graham Watts sees New Futures from Ballet Nights, featuring 150 dancers from seven leading dance schools, but it needed pruning and better management.
| Title | New Futures |
| Company | Ballet Nights |
| Venue | Cadogan Hall, London |
| Date | 9 June 2026 |
| Reviewer | Graham Watts |
The Ballet Nights brand started, several iterations ago, as something of a Morris Minor, with a few stars of the art form giving cabaret-style performances in the gargantuan setting of the Lanterns Studio Theatre in London’s Docklands. Since the beginning, many aspects of the brand have remained consistent, not least the amiable hosting by the brand’s founder, Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, introducing each act with elegant panache. His perfectly formed miniaturisation of the gala concept has attracted new audiences and rightly earned Devernay-Laurence the first-ever nomination of a producer for a National Dance Award.
From a noisy newcomer to the ballet scene, the brand has blossomed and this New Futures show was something of a juggernaut, showcasing some 150 dancers from seven schools: in order of performance, the Royal Ballet School, Elmhurst School of Ballet, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, English National Ballet School, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Central School of Ballet and – closing the show – Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. It must have been a difficult selection because the absence of the London Contemporary Dance School and Laban was notable.
As a powerful example of the newfound reach of Ballet Nights, its director of development for South-East Asia, Maria Sascha Khan (based in Bali), introduced a fourteen-year-old discovery from that region, Aiko Larasati, who showcased a charming version of the Raymonda variation with legs that seemed already as long as those of Sylvie Guillem in her prime. The gala featured a dozen pieces that ranged in quantum from that solo to an ensemble of some sixty dancers!
Ballet Nights’ London venue is now the Cadogan Hall, which is fine for the usual cabaret fare of a solo or pas de deux, but struggles to contain larger ensembles, not least through the problem of entrances and exits with a lack of wings. There is nothing more off-putting than watching dancers on stage framed by those fidgeting around while waiting to come on.
We are arriving at the time of year when student dance shows will fall on London like summer rain. And so, bringing seven schools together for one show to demonstrate the plethora of future talent is a good idea, but it needed stricter timescales and a degree of pruning. Some works went on for far too long. The near three-hour duration also wasn’t helped by the fact that, instead of Jamiel-Laurence, each piece was introduced by the relevant School’s director in what seemed so much like a pitch to the Dragon’s Den that I wondered if there were some important potential benefactors in the audience. I hope that there were.
The dancers on display came from across the whole spectrum, from first-year students to those who appear already to have been offered professional contracts as they near the end of their school career. Most of these dancers are a very long way from proximity to the finished article, and it is therefore unfair and unwise to try to review their performances. Suffice to say that the work was truly a mixed bag of all sorts, ranging from a demonstration of the ingredients of a ballet class, through to extracts of pieces by choreographers as diverse as Hofesh Shechter, Kenneth MacMillan, Amaury Lebrun and Ashley Page.
The opening Class Demonstration by students across all three years of the Royal Ballet School was an indication of the supreme technical levels being achieved by that institution. I was impressed by my first sight of Lachlan Monaghan’s choreography in the musicality of his Axios, performed by Elmhurst students, to music by Rachmaninoff. But the star of the show, for me, was Millán De Benito, a student at The Royal Ballet School, who introduced his own choreography in Anima Mea, performed exquisitely by Nanoha Shigeoka, Wendel Viera Teles Dos Santos and other students from the RBS. He is a real find for the future.
It was a pity that there were some technical glitches. One group of students stood on stage in a disciplined, quasi-military formation for what seemed like an age while their music played before one or two started to look nervously around. They were ushered offstage, and when they returned it became clear that the music tape had been started too early and the first moments of their choreography were to have been performed in silence. Such mistakes happen, but they shouldn’t happen in professional shows. Since there were at least two other mishaps earlier, albeit slighter, one was left with the impression that there had been insufficient time for a get-in.
Ballet Nights is, itself, an important part of a new future for the art form, and whilst I think that it needed more tightly-controlled management, this bringing together of seven schools is a great idea, giving not only the opportunity to compare and contrast but an understanding of the richness of talent that awaits us.
Graham Watts is a freelance writer and dance critic. He writes for The Spectator, Tanz, Shinshokan Dance Magazine (Japan), Ballet Magazine (Romania), BachTrack and the Hong Kong International Arts Festival and has previously written for the Sunday Express, Dancing Times, Dance Europe, DanceTabs, London Dance, the Edinburgh International Festival and Pointe magazine (USA). He has also written the biography of Daria Klimentová (The Agony and the Ecstasy) and contributed chapters about the work of Akram Khan to the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet and on Shobana Jeyasingh for the third edition of Routledge’s Fifty Contemporary Choreographers.
He is Chairman of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle and of the UK National Dance Awards and regularly lectures on dance writing and criticism at The Royal Academy of Dance, The Place and (until the war) for Balletristic in Kyiv. He was a nominee for the Dance Writing Award in the 2018 One Dance UK Awards and was appointed OBE in 2008.
