London City Ballet, Rebirth

Last Updated on January 27, 2026

Works by Page, Robbins, Chu, Ratmansky

5.0 out of 5.0 stars

You simply cannot say it often enough: London City Ballet is A. Good. Thing.

Barely two years old, this small modern-day reiteration of the late lamented eponymous troupe (1978-1997), a favourite of Princess Diana’s, carved its place in the British ballet scene from the word “go” with a combination of astute, engaging programming and thrilling dancing.

Rebirth is its second mixed bill of the season, following Momentum, which toured widely in the summer, and it marks the company’s debut on the RBO second stage, the Linbury.  Following the mission statement crafted by company founder and director Christopher Marney, all London City Ballet programmes will include a brand new work, alongside a piece that meant something in its time but has since fallen into near oblivion, and two established works.

In Rebirth, these are respectively Tasha Chu’s Soon, Jerome Robbins’s Quiet City, Ashley Page’s Larina Waltz and Alexei Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.   Page’s piece was the very first performed by the company in its inaugural programme, and Ratmansky’s was new to the company in Momentum.

I was particularly looking forward to Jerome Robbins’s  Quiet City.  The great American choreographer (best known, perhaps, for West Side Story) created it for three male dancers in 1986.  Set to a score by Aaron Copland, it’s an elegiac piece, a memorial to a dancer Robbins had worked with a New York City Ballet, Joseph Duell, who died aged 30.

Three male dancers costumed in simple white enter, watched from the sidelines by two dark groups.   The central character is danced with sublime elegance by the Cuban Alejandro Virelles. 

His two friends are principal dancer Joseph Taylor and the young, exciting Brazilian Arthur Wille.

Staged by Robert La Fosse, who was part of Quiet City’s original cast, and atmospherically lit by Andrew Ellis after Jennifer Tipton, this is a poignant piece, its soft, unhurried movement leading inexorably to death.  The two men circle Virelles.  They tenderly lift him as if trying to stop him slipping away, before finally laying him on the ground. 

Tasha Chu is a young dancer and choreographer who danced with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures and has absorbed some of Bourne’s own muscular approach to dance.  However, Soon, co-commissioned by the RBO for Rebirth, is very much her own work and marks her out as an assured, original talent.

Soon is also about loss – “the mourning that begins before loss fully arrives”, as the programme states.  A young couple, Sahel Flora Pascual and Siméon Sorange-Félicité are centre stage as a group comes to them as if bringing bad news.   At first I thought this was going be a piece so darkly lit it would be difficult to see properly, but Andrew Ellis’s lighting gradually lifted without losing its doom-laden quality.

Chu’s movement, set to music by Sam Robinson, contrasts vividly with that of Quiet City, which precedes it in Rebirth: it’s strong, sweeping, grounded and intensely physical.  You feel the connection between the two characters as they cling to each other in a doomed attempt to allay the inevitable; Gavin Bryars’s dirge ‘Jesus’ blood never failed me yet’ takes the piece to a slow end.

I certainly want to see a lot more from Tasha Chu.

Rebirth opens with Ashley Page’s 1993 Larina Waltz, danced to an extract from Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin.   It’s a tutu gala piece for five couples, it’s classical ballet language organised in a dizzying variety of formations, that gives each dancer an opportunity to shine – and shine they did, from established principals Joseph Taylor and Constance Devernay-Laurence, to young company members like new graduate Lydia Rose Hough and the Colombian Josué Gomez. 

The much-in-demand, US-based Ukrainian choreographer Alexei Ratmansky created Pictures at an Exhibition for New York City Ballet in 2014.  Danced to the Modest Mussorgsky score, it’s inspired by the abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky, who staged his own version of Mussorgsky’s piece.

So, the backcloth for Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is made up of enhanced projections of Kandinsky’s own  ‘Colour Study: Squares with Concentric Circles’.  Adeline Andre’s costumes are flimsy white tunics stained with splashes of soft colour mirroring Kandinsky’s shapes.

The dancers hurtle through the piece’s 10 sections in a giddy succession of moods: jolly, zany, lyrical, in a stream of thrillingly inventive choreography.  Ratmansky confounds expectations: ‘The Gnome’ is danced by a woman, here the powerful, immensely expressive Constance Deverney-Laurence; later,the witch Baba Yaga is danced by a man, the buoyant Joseph Taylor.

Ratmansky’s Pictures at an Exhibition traces an unbroken line from Mussorgsky’s 1874 composition – here played live with tremendous gusto by pianist Reina Okada – to the modern day: in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ratmansky added the Ukrainian flag to the backdrop for the finale section named “The Great Gates of Kyiv”.

London City Ballet, Rebirth is at the Linbury from 19/11 to 22/11 (returns only)

Linbury, RBO
Bow Street
London WC2E 9DD