The best dance and ballet shows in May 2024

The Olivier Award–winning dance company for dancers of Black and Asian descent will present a double bill of exciting new works at the Barbican this May. Acclaimed choreographer Mthuthuzeli November explores the purpose of life in The Waiting Game, while If At First, by Sophie Laplane, the Choreographer in Residence at Scottish Ballet, contemplates the complexity of humanity, heroism and self-acceptance.

Hip hop festival Breakin’ Convention is back at Sadler’s Wells for its 21st anniversary. Its guiding light and curator Jonzi D creates a forum for the best hip hop dance theatre from the around the UK and the rest of the world.

The event attracts a diverse and lively young crowd. This year’s global line-up features dancers and crews including Boy Blue, Jinjo Crew from South Korea,  LA-based Femme Fatale, UK-baed ShaolinOrShao and Olivier Award winners TRAPLORD. 

Scottish Ballet has kept up an eclectic repertoire of work over the last decade, from technically-stringent Balanchine pieces to fun family fairy tales. This retelling of Tennessee Williams’ fiery play, A Streetcar Named Desire returns to Sadler’s this year. It’s created by Colombian/Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and American theatre and film director Nancy Meckler with a jazz-inspired score by Pater Salem.

'The Winter’s Tale' is back at Royal Opera House in 2024. This review is from its 2014 opening.

Love may conquer all, but the road there is often paved with jealousy and heartache. Cue British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’. One of the Bard’s lesser-realised tragicomedies, it’s now the first major new Shakespearean ballet in half a century.

Friendship between kings is put to the test, a wife’s fidelity is questioned, a mother and son perish, a newborn is abandoned. Where’s the comedy you may ask? Well there’s not a lot in the fraught first act of this psychological story.

Edward Watson articulates the paranoid Leontes’ suspicions about his wife’s fidelity, transforming the first act’s nobleman-protagonist from a loving husband into a wretched monster full of unsettled anguish. Under Natasha Katz’s brilliant lighting design, this inner turmoil spirals compellingly into insanity.

Colourful courtly scenes turn to sour distress, and after 49 minutes you’re in need of the sublime relief of act two. Here, designer Bob Crowley triumphs with his set for Bohemia, the land of delight and merriment where Leontes’ daughter Perdita has grown up in the 16 years since act one, unaware of her royal lineage.

Under an enchanted tree, the gaiety of love between Perdita and young nobleman Florizel is stunningly performed by Sarah Lamb and Steven McRae – the fusing of classical direction with the odd contemporary twist is sheer heaven. Their fluidity of movement brings Shakespeare’s poetry to life in a whirl of sneaked kisses and loving embraces.

With a score by Joby Talbot that flits between Hitchcockian intensity and alluring oriental folk, Wheeldon’s adaptation conveys the highs and lows of love through swooping contrasts and diverse duets, merging traditional ballet with a more modern sensibility.

This festival of Korea's most exciting dance work is back at The Place for a seventh year. The thrilling and experimental performances include shows from the award-winning 99 Art Company and a double-bill of K:dance.

Groundbreaking hip-hop company and Olivier Award winners Boy Blue brings a world premiere to the Barbican this spring. Exploring life and death, cycles of nature and the idea of constant movement, ‘Cycles’ is an abstract work that departs from Boy Blue’s other works that often centre Black trauma. Based on the spectacular success of Boy Blue's production ‘Free Your Mind’, ‘Cycles’ is sure to be a knock-out.