English National Ballet will present Nutcracker Delights at the London Coliseum (3 December 2020 to 3 January 2021), featuring a selection of the ballet’s most popular moments with Tchaikovsky’s score played live by English National Ballet Philharmonic.
This show replaces cancelled performances of Nutcracker at the London Coliseum, while Creature by Akram Khan and Raymonda by Tamara Rojo after Marius Petipa have been postponed to 2021.
Tamara Rojo CBE, ENB Artistic Director, said, “English National Ballet has performed a version of The Nutcracker every year since we were founded in 1950 and I’m so pleased that, despite the challenges faced, we have been able to find a way for the tradition to live on, in this, our 70th Anniversary year.”
Reunion: An Evening with English National Ballet features five world premières at Sadler’s Wells 19–21 November 2020. Originally commissioned as creations for camera for ENB’s upcoming digital season and now also adapted for the stage, the new works have been choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant, Yuri Possokhov, Arielle Smith, and Stina Quagebeur.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Laid in Earth is a “torn apart” quartet set to Purcell’s famous aria from Dido and Aeneas sung live by mezzo soprano Flora McIntosh, as well as new electronic music by Olga Wojciechowska. Russell Maliphant has collaborated with video artist Panagiotis Tomaras and with commissioned sound design by Dana Fouras.
A former principal dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, choreographer Yuri Possokhov has created a piece for four dancers, Senseless Kindness, based on Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate about a Russian family caught in the Second World War and set to Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 1.
In Take Five Blues, Stina Quagebeur responds to two of her favourite pieces of music, Bach’s Vivace and Paul Desmond’s jazz standard Take Five. Arielle Smith’s Jolly Folly is fast-paced and driven by the Klazz Brothers’ latin-infused covers of Tchaikovsky, Strauss and Mozart.