Vancouver dance talent takes London by storm

Today is the final day London, U.K., audiences have the chance to see a work-in-progress showing of Joshua Beamish’s Reimagining Giselle. Beamish was invited to work with the Royal Ballet this year as part of "Draft Works in the Clore", a series focusing on choreographic ideas in development.

The dance season winds down with many of B.C.’s ballet talent in Britain.   

The Royal Ballet also announced last week that Crystal Pite is one of three commissions for its 2016-17 season. The choreographer and her work are internationally sought after but this engagement with Great Britain’s largest ballet is especially notable because, as The Guardian dance critic Judith Mackrell notes, Pite is the first woman to be invited to make work on the company since 1999.

U.K. audiences will get a chance to see Pite’s work before next season when her company, Kidd Pivot’s theatrical work Betroffenheit visits London’s Sadler’s Wells at the end of May, and a week before that when Ballet BC stops in Birmingham, U.K., with Pite's Solo Echo on a mixed program. (It also plays here, at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, from May 12 to 14.)

Other Canadian choreographers making waves in London include Aszure Barton, whose new work Fantastic Beings with the English National Ballet runs until April 16 as part of She Said; and Toronto-based Robert Binet, who next year, under the mentorship of the Royal Ballet Resident Choreographer Wayne McGregor, will present a new studio work with the company.