Review: Ballet Nights v012 – string quartet and new compere freshen the format
Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw dance David Dawson’s choreography to Max Richter, while a string quartet replaces the regular pianist and Cape Town City Ballet makes its UK debut.
| Title | Ballet Nights 012 3rd Birthday Programme |
| Company | Ballet Nights |
| Venue | Cadogan Hall, London |
| Date | 28 September 2026 |
| Reviewer | Graham Watts |
The Ballet Nights brand returned for its twelfth iteration in London to celebrate its third anniversary with a familiar format freshened by some newness. Up until this programme, the concert pianist Viktor Erik Emanuel has been a regular feature of Ballet Nights, and he was replaced for v012 by the Concrete (string) Quartet, who opened the first act with Dominic Stokes’ arrangement of the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty; and the second by accompanying the baritone, Michael Lafferty, in his expressive performance of Figaro’s Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville. Lafferty was parachuted in at the eleventh hour to replace Patrick Keefe, and he captured the enthusiasm of Figaro with alacrity, although wearing a face microphone (I suspect to elevate his voice above the string quartet on stage alongside him).
Another significant change was to replace the Ballet Nights’ founder, Jamiel Devernay-Laurence, as the show’s compere with Anaish Yilma Parmar, who trained as a professional dancer at London Contemporary Dance School and now combines a career as a professional compere with fundraising, currently as Head of Legacies at British Red Cross. The elegant savoir-faire of Devernay-Laurence is a hard act to follow, and Parmar was similarly suave and pleasing, but at times seemed to be declaiming a script.
Several Ballet Nights’ regulars returned for this twelfth London gig, led by three dancers from The Royal Ballet. Yasmine Naghdi and Reece Clarke bookended the dance proceedings by first rattling through Asaf Messerer’s brief Spring Waters Pas de Deux, which is characterised by two travelling, behind-the-shoulders lifts and a huge presage “bum” lift as the couple retire from the stage. They returned to close proceedings in two excerpts from Kenneth MacMillan’s Elite Syncopations (Stoptime Rag and Bethena Rag Waltz), dressed in Ian Spurling’s memorable and colourful costumes. The couple danced the work with suitable cheeky inflections but, for me at least, they don’t work as concert excerpts shorn of the rest of the ensemble and ballet.
The other Royal Ballet guest was Harris Bell, who danced an intense solo, There Were Storms, choreographed by Travis Clausen-Knight of PCK Dance (another BN regular). Sangeun Lee and Gareth Haw, both of whom had just concluded performing in the English National Ballet‘s Rhythm Riot programme at Sadler’s Wells, produced the highlight of the evening in a duet to the music of Max Richter by David Dawson. We see far too little of Dawson’s choreography in the UK, and this was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy his lyrical, passionate movement performed by two dancers with ineffable chemistry.
The last of the returnees was Liam Woodvine, who danced a duet, entitled BREATH, with Taylor Hughes, which was a Ballet Nights New Commission (and hence a world premiere) made possible by the Abderrahim Crickmay Charitable Settlement. The dancers, with their faces covered until the final moments, were joined together with a thick umbilical cord in costumes by Asli Ozuak that managed to convey both primaeval and futuristic imagery.
Two regular features in the Ballet Nights programme are to introduce an international company to British audiences and to showcase dancers of the future. For the former, it was a pleasure to welcome Hannah Ward and Leusson Muniz from Cape Town City Ballet who attended alongside their artistic director, Tracey Li.
In the first act, the pair danced the UK premiere of a duet from Garry Trinder’s rarely performed Pie Jesus, a suitably elegiac pas de deux with several lifts in which Ward’s outstretched arms and straight legs in front of her partner’s torso resembled a crucifix. While the choreography was piously slow, Ward’s skintight Lycra costume was anything but reverent!
The couple returned in the second act to perform an extract from Veronica Paeper’s comedic Orpheus in the Underworld, in Peter Cazelet’s costumes that seemed to have once served the Can-Can or something similar. This idea of Greek Mythology as a comedy is intriguing, and I’d love to see the whole of Paeper’s witty ballet, created in 1982.
The future of ballet was represented by Mako Egawa and Alejandro Rosa Constantino from the pre-professional Acosta Dance Foundation, performing the full grand pas de deux from Carlos Acosta‘s Don Quixote. It’s a challenging set of virtuoso dances to take on, especially in the tiring coda that follows the two dancers’ variations, and the young pair acquitted themselves admirably.
Pointe shoes gave way to bare feet in the following duet by James Wilton and Sarah Jane Taylor, entitled LOKI, part of a full-length work that will tour the UK next year. It was an earnest and arduous duet, full of strenuous lifts and raw, earthy movement that contrasted completely with the disciplined classical pas de deux that had come before. By coincidence, both dancers had trained at the London Contemporary Dance School with the evening’s host.
I still have reservations about Cadogan Hall’s suitability as a venue for dance. The lighting doesn’t suit the pace of movement, and it felt as if the house lights were up most of the time. The lack of wings makes the entrances and exits occasionally cumbersome. Worst of all is the door at the rear, stage left, which, unscreened by a flat, opened and closed several times during performances to give the distraction of flashing bright light. The excellent content deserved better.
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.
