Looking back over my reviews from 2025, I’ve found myself struck by what a good year it’s been for dance. It hasn’t been particularly seismic or sensational in terms of developments within the industry, but I realise I’ve written just one two-star review (so sorry, Quadrophenia: you had it coming) and awarded an unusually high number of four-stars.
Depending on point of view, the biggest surprise was either the stunning Giselle that the National Ballet of Japan brought to Covent Garden in the summer, or the startling pudenda that Sharon Eyal’s eight dancers formed on the Sadler’s Wells stage last month. At any rate, never a dull moment.
5. Into the Hairy, Sharon Eyal/SED
Sadler’s Wells
Good gracious! Even if (like me) you were previously acquainted with Israeli-born choreographer Sharon Eyal’s work – with her uncompromising approach to repetitive movement – this new, recently premiered piece was genuinely astounding.
Just 45 minutes long, and presented solus (that’s nerve for you), it saw an octet of dancers chugging sensuously around the stage in razor-sharp formations, before suddenly ushering us into eye-widening surrealist territory. Reviewing it just a few weeks ago, I commented that it wouldn’t be hard to rubbish this sort of malarkey, but it would have been dishonest. As an unapologetically boundary-pushing walk on the wild side, it was remarkable stuff.
4. Fools, Northern Ballet
Linbury Theatre
Part of Northern Ballet’s mixed bill way back in January, this work by the South African-born, British-based choreographer and dancer Mthuthuzeli November was utterly original. The piece was inspired by RL Pereni’s 1976 novel Hill of Fools, about a longstanding feud between two villages and families that’s further complicated in time-honoured fashion: a Thembu boy and and a Hlubi girl are madly in love.
If the story inevitably played out very much like a township Romeo and Juliet, there were surprises everywhere, with Harris Beattie and Sarah Chun so convincingly in love as the star-crossed couple that you feel they only barely resisted the temptation to disrobe each other there and then.
3. Mary, Queen of Scots, Scottish Ballet
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
This strange, hallucinatory telling of the ill-fated Catholic monarch’s story – told through the eyes and memories of the moribund Queen Elizabeth – proved yet another Edinburgh International Festival hit for Scottish Ballet.
The set was as modern and minimalist as anything from World of Interiors, but the Tudors-meets-punk aesthetic about her hair and clothes design – all ruffs, frilly undies and mohawks – worked an absolute treat, while the electro-acoustic score by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson amped up the sense of old-meets-new. In Kayla-Maree Tarantolo’s uncanny, astonishingly nimble Jester – part fool, part conscience, part one-woman Greek chorus – it also boasted one of the performances of 2025.
2. Giselle, National Ballet of Japan
Covent Garden
Probably the biggest and best surprise of the year. Stepping into the Covent Garden summer schedule (in the ongoing, unavoidable absence of the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky), Japan’s flagship company delivered an ultra-traditional Giselle that simply did not put a foot wrong: a heartbreaking, almost immersively atmospheric Rhineland ghost story... from Tokyo.
All credit to Miyako Yoshida – NBJ’s director since 2020, and the show’s producer – for so deftly deploying the lessons she clearly soaked up during her 15 years as a star with our own Royal Ballet. But full marks, too, to this almost absurdly young company for getting so completely and so professionally behind her. I’ve never seen a corps quite like it.
1. Against the Tide, Royal Ballet
Covent Garden
I was holding out, keenly hoping that this short work – a mid-November premiere – might prove a late-breaking triumph for the Royal Ballet; its seasoned creator Cathy Marston did not let me down. Set to Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto of 1938-39, and infused with elements of Britten’s biography, this ostensibly abstract work in fact tells a vivid story of sorts, emerging as an extremely powerful and poignant chronicle of lost youth.
Chloe Lamford’s extraordinary Giant’s Causeway-style set is pitch-perfect, as were the first-cast performances I caught – they were clearly elated to be in Marston’s orbit, and she in theirs. Unquestionably the most accomplished and sophisticated new work of 2025.
...and the worst
Quadrophenia
Sadler’s Wells
Back in June, this “mod ballet” was endorsed by Pete Townshend and the music even co-scored by his wife – what could possibly go wrong? Tragically, though, all the sharp or exciting edges of the 1973 album’s narrative – so cleverly exploited on the big screen in Franc Roddam’s marvellous 1979 film – turned out to have been either completely filed off or hopelessly sanded down.
What particularly struck me was the disappointment that lay in wait not for people who already knew the music and the film, but for those who didn’t. The uninitiated could well have come away from this wondering what the big fuss is about the Who full-stop – a crying shame.