The Royal Ballet 2024-2025 Season has been announced today revealing a program that honors the company’s history as well as its commitment to presenting new productions by some of today’s most forward-thinking dance makers and creative teams.
Classical full-length ballets such as Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet are joined by contemporary adaptations of literature: Onegin, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and MaddAdam.
There are repertory programs dedicated to George Balanchine and Artistic Associate of The Royal Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon, and another featuring contemporary works by Kyle Abraham, Crystal Pite, Pam Tanowitz, and Joseph Toonga.
Pite’s Light of Passage will also see its return.
To note, going forward, London‘s most renowned performing arts institution will operate under a new combined organizational name – The Royal Ballet and Opera.
The Royal Ballet and Opera 2024-2025 Season Trailer
The Royal Ballet 2024-2025 Season Schedule
The Royal Ballet: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
September 28, 2024 – July 6, 2025 | Royal Opera House
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Christopher Wheeldon
The Royal Ballet: Encounters
October 22 – November 16, 2024 | Royal Opera House
- The Weathering by Kyle Abraham
- World Premiere by Pam Tanowitz
- World Premiere by Joseph Toonga
- The Statement by Crystal Pite
A gentle meditation on love, loss and memory, Kyle Abraham’s The Weathering (the first one-act ballet created by Abraham for The Royla Ballet) is danced to music by composer Ryan Lott (Everything Everywhere All at Once).
In a new work expanding on her previous success with Dispatch Duet, Pam Tanowitz brings her trademark wit and light to turn the conventions of dance inside out.
Joseph Toonga presents his second Main Stage work for The Royal Ballet where the idioms of classical ballet and hip-hop converge.
Four characters battle for control in Crystal Pite’s riveting dance-drama, The Statement, which is choreographed to spoken word, exploring the shadowy depths of human nature and boardroom politics.
The Royal Ballet: MaddAddam
November 14-30, 2024 | Royal Opera House
MaddAddam is the third piece in Wayne McGregor’s trilogy of works (along with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) that adapt Margaret Atwood’s novels into dance. Themes of extinction and invention, hubris and humanity, love and loss, are spliced together with aspects of Atwood’s non-fiction writings and activist voice in this exhilarating exploration of life beyond societal collapse.
The Royal Ballet: Cinderella
December 3, 2024 – January 25, 2025 | Royal Opera House
Cinderella was the first three-act ballet that Frederick Ashton choreographed for The Royal Ballet back in 1946. Set to Prokofiev’s score, he created his own version of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale story that has since become a staple in the company’s repertoire.
The Royal Ballet: Onegin
January 22 – June 12, 2025 | Royal Opera House
Based on the characters of Alexander Pushkin’s novel Eugene Onegin, John Cranko choreographed Onegin to Kurt-Heinz Stolze’s arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s opera score. Celebrating its 60th birthday in 2025, the ballet explores the themes of unrequited love, impulsive choices, and bitter regret.
The Royal Ballet: Light of Passage
February 20 – March 12, 2025 | Royal Opera House
In Light of Passage (part of a trilogy alongside Covenant and Passage), set to music by Henryk Mikolaj Górecki, Crystal Pite reckons with the existential tensions of the human condition, masterfully demonstrating how art can move the soul and provoke thought.
“There is a profound optimism in putting something like this out into the world and connecting to each other through it. When people collaborate to create a work of art and an audience gathers to witness it, there is something very hopeful and powerful about the experience. I want to create conditions in the theatre where we can gather around what we cannot know and grapple with it, together.”
– Crystal Pite
The Royal Ballet: Romeo and Juliet
March 4 – May 26, 2025 | Royal Opera House
Also celebrating its 60th birthday in 2025 is Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev’s evocative music sets the scene for stolen romantic moments and deadly feuds and sweeps the ballet towards its inevitable and tragic conclusion.
March 28 – April 8, 2025 | Royal Opera House
- Serenade by George Balanchine
- Prodigal Son by George Balanchine
- Symphony in C by George Balanchine
Set to Tchaikovsky’s soaring Serenade for Strings, the ethereal Serenade, Balanchine’s first ballet created in America, was created on the students at the School of American Ballet (which he had newly founded) in 1935 . The choreography of Serenade reflects this – the real-life mistakes made by the students ended up in his finished ballet.
Prodigal Son is an avant-garde ballet of sin and redemption, and was Balanchine’s last creation on Sergei Diaghilev’s famed ballet company, the Ballets Russes. Inspired by the biblical parable, it recounts the story of a rebellious son who returns home remorseful to his father after a dalliance with a beautiful but dangerous siren. The ballet premiered in 1929 with a commissioned score by Prokofiev.
With its symmetrical formations and crystalline placements, Symphony in C brings this program to a majestic and exhilarating close. Balanchine choreographed this grand classical work on the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, finishing its creation in only two weeks and using a newly-discovered Bizet score which gives the ballet its name.
May 9-27, 2025 | Royal Opera House
- Fool’s Paradise by Christopher Wheeldon
- The Two of Us by Christopher Wheeldon
- Us by Christopher Wheeldon
- An American in Paris by Christopher Wheeldon
Luminescent and shimmering, Fool’s Paradise marked the first of Wheeldon’s many collaborations with composer Joby Talbot and created for his own company Morphoses in 2007.
The wistful songs of Joni Mitchell set the scene for the UK premiere of The Two of Us, a duet of deep intimacy and yearning created in 2020 for the Fall for Dance Festival in New York.
Us is a tender duet danced by two men created in 2017 for BalletBoyz and is set to Keaten Henson’s music.
The Royal Ballet celebrates Wheeldon’s extraordinary success in musical theatre by performing the ballet scene from his Tony Award-winning musical An American in Paris. Set to Gershwin’s jazzy melodies, the musical is inspired by the 1951 film of the same name starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron. The ballet excerpt was Wheeldon’s take on one of the most memorable scenes from the film – an extended sequence in which the two central characters dance through Paris.
Featured Photo for The Royal Ballet 2024-2025 season of Fumi Kaneko in Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella. Photo by Andrej Uspenski.