The Royal Ballet announces 2025-2026 season

The Royal Ballet, London, the United Kingdom, announced the 2025-2026 season on 2nd April 2025.

The new season highlight, in my opinion, is Akram Khan's new full-length piece, Carnage and the Divine, his first work for the Royal Ballet to be performed in July. Khan draws inspiration from Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in a new full-length ballet (another new Eugene Onegin for the next season).

According to The Guardian newspaper, Khan is working with a small group of dancers, including Principal Francesca Hayward. As a personal note, I remember Carnage and the Divine as a working title of Khan's work with Olga Smirnova as detailed on the MART website.

Resident choreographer Wayne McGregor will create a new ballet as a part of the McGregor: Alchemies tripel bill programme, which features his works only.

Cathy Marston - one of the two female choreographers to be featured in the new season at the main auditorium if I am not mistaken- will creates a new abstract work for the Perspectives: Balanchine, Marston, Peck triple bill. The Peck obviously refers to Justin Peck, Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet. His 2014 work, Everywhere We Go, will be featured in the triple bill.

Another new faces with The Royal Ballet are choreographic duo Paul Lightfoot and Sol León -- the other female choreographer. They will stage a double bill, So Are We: León and Lightfoot, including a world premiere.

Revivals include Frederick Ashton’s La Fille mal gardée, Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling, Peter Wright's Giselle and The Nutcracker, Christopher Wheeldon's Like Water for Chocolate (beautiful) and McGregor's Woolf Works (also beautiful).

For more information about the Opera new season, the Linbury Theatre programmes, including another Linbury/Osipova and Edward Watson's comeback, and visiting companies, including Ballet Black, London City Ballet, Northern Ballet and others, click here.

Here is the YouTube clip of the exuberant Everywhere We Go by the New York City Ballet.