Ballet Rambert plans centenary tour in China

One of Britain’s most famous artistic institutions will celebrate its centenary next year with a tour of China, keeping alive a historical link that goes back nearly 70 years.

Ballet Rambert, located in London’s South Bank, is a world-renowned contemporary dance company. Next spring, it will return to some of the cities it first visited in 1957.

“For our centenary, we didn’t just want to focus on the United Kingdom, where we’re already well-known, so we’re really excited to return to China,” the company’s chief executive, Helen Shute, told China Daily. “At Ballet Rambert, we have a history of seeking out new audiences, doing challenging things and going on big adventures.”

The company’s first visit to China in 1957 certainly qualified as a big adventure, as the touring party, headed by company founder Marie Rambert, conducted an extensive national tour. “It took them three days to get there, and 27 flights,” Shute said.

The tour, calling at Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, Nanjing and Hangzhou, saw the company perform classic ballets Giselle and Coppelia, as well as a more modern work called Winter Nights, which was dropped from the program after failing to prove a hit with local audiences.

The visit was a success, with The Times newspaper reporting that members of the touring company were introduced to both Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai.

In the summer of 2025, teachers from the Rambert School went to Jiashan county in Zhejiang province and Guangzhou in Guangdong province to conduct classes in the distinctive Rambert training methods in both classical ballet and contemporary dance. Next year, the company will be back for a five-week tour to mark its 100th birthday.

The tour opens in Shenzhen in March, and will also call at Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai and Suzhou, with other destinations yet to be confirmed. It is hoped that an exhibition of archive material from that trip could run alongside the tour.

The production being performed is called Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, inspired by the BBC, and subsequently Netflix drama series Peaky Blinders, set in the industrial city of Birmingham in the aftermath of World War I, which has inspired a fashion movement, an upcoming movie, and now a ballet, using contemporary rock music as the foundation for its score.

“When we toured the show in the UK, we had people coming who were passionate about the series, and others who loved dance but had never watched it, and had equally positive reactions from both sides of the aisle,” said Shute.

Rambert’s tour partner is production company Royo, which has offices in Shanghai and London. Its CEO Tom de Keyser said: “Our partner in China says the young audience has a real passion for contemporary dance, and Rambert has always been slightly edgier than other more classical companies, so hopefully we can take other Rambert productions there in years to come.”

Chinese theatergoers, he explained, are less easy to pigeonhole than those in the West. “You walk into a play, a dance show or a musical in the UK and you will see different demographics at each, who almost fulfill the cliche of what you expect that audience to look like. But China has more varied tastes, you will find every age group and every demographic in all types of shows. I think China is developing an extraordinarily committed young audience who have more eclectic tastes than we have here.”