A Timeless Celebration

With the exception of the central pas de deux from “Le Corsaire,” this bill, held to celebrate Marianela Nuñez’s remarkable 28-year run at the Royal Ballet, pulls solely from the twentieth century. Nuñez programmed it herself, taking the lead in one-act ballets from Jerome Robbins and Frederick Ashton, as well as the “Le Corsaire” pas and a Tchaikovsky-scored variation from George Balanchine. Together these bookend a suite of duets performed by a hand-picked group of fellow principals. In every appearance, Nuñez is as radiant and assured as you’d expect from the company’s longest-serving resident principal (24 years and counting).

Performance

The Royal Ballet: “Marianela – Timeless”

Place

Royal Opera House, London, UK, July 31, 2026

Words

Sara Veale

Marianela Nuñez and Patricio Revé in “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” by George Balanchine. Photograph by Maria-Helena Buckley

While the evening has its spectacles—there are multiple rounds of picture-perfect fouettés, and twice Nuñez throws herself at a lover’s feet, tulle pooled around her bowed form—it’s not grandstanding. In fact, there’s something beatific about it all, almost to the point that it reads like a swansong, although Nuñez has been adamant that she has many years ahead of her. Another dancer might have gone for something more showboating and canon-forward, but this is not a ballerina who serves; she’s one who delivers, graciously.

Take her turn in Robbins’s “In the Night,” a 1970 rumination on the different stages of romantic love. Nuñez and Matthew Ball are tasked with tempestuous, full-blooded passion, an ardour that vaults from feisty to affectionate and back again; and yet she refrains from the gasping sensibility this might suggest, instead anchoring her diving lifts and tunnelling soutenus with unflappable self-possession, like an empress expecting the cards to fall her way no matter what.

Marianela Nuñez and William Bracewell in “Marguerite and Armand” by Frederick Ashton. Photograph by Maria-Helena Buckley

And in Ashton’s “Margeurite and Armand” (1963), she finds a certain dignity in her interpretation of the titular consumption-stricken courtesan, moderating all the retching and the collapsing so that it doesn’t eclipse the wider pathos of the story, which is as much about regret as it is romance. Skirt in hand, she traces circles around William Bracewell’s Armand and his interfering father (Christopher Saunders), her chin at a stately lilt. It’s a shrewd tack for a role that was famously created on (and, according to many, solely belonged to) Margot Fonteyn—one in consonance with her own serene mien as an artist.

Where the above ballets spotlight Nunez’s theatrical flair, “Le Corsaire” centres her technical talents, especially her springing grand allegro and seamless lines, both rendered with polished economy. Dancing opposite Vadim Muntagirov—in his element here as a beaming, bounding, belly-baring prince —Nuñez looks radiant in her tutu-and-tiara photo finish. While our prima rests, Ball slots in with Mayara Magri to dance a similarly joyous coupling: the balcony scene from Kenneth MacMillan’s 1965 “Romeo and Juliet,” complete with a comely first kiss.

Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov in “Le Corsaire” by Marius Petipa. Photograph by Maria-Helena Buckley

The programme saves its modern offerings for others, starting with a duet from Wayne McGregor’s “Infra” (2008), all prickly legs and snaking torsos. Akane Takada and Calvin Richardson surf its hypnotic ripples, undulant as a lava lamp. Next is a snippet from Christopher Wheeldon’s melancholic “After the Rain,” from 2005, Fumi Kaneko and Lukas B. Brændsrød deftly rebounding from each broken shape to greet the next. The tenderness of these two extracts—shored up with stirring scores by Max Richter and Arvo Pärt, respectively—left me wishing Nuñez had saved one of them for herself.

Her own final pick of the variations, Balanchine’s “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” performed with new joiner Patricio Revé, feels a little sterile by comparison. It’s striking of course, with a soaring melody and a lovely closing fish dive, but tinged with Apollonian restraint. Still, it duly captures the blissful overtone of the wider programme. Nuñez’s passion for ballet—and “gratitude that I’m still doing it now,” as she notes in the programme—is present at every turn, whether she’s skittering in the throes of death or waltzing under the stars.

Sara Veale

Sara Veale is a London-based writer and editor. She's a member of the UK Dance Critics' Circle and has written about dance for the Observer, the Spectator, Harper's Bazaar, Auditorium, Gramophone and more. Her book, Wild Grace: The Untamed Women of Modern Dance, was published by Faber in 2025.

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