The Royal Ballet review, Royal Opera House: The company returns with a wave of love

Standing ovations were offered up for these world and company premieres – including Crystal Pite’s ‘The Statement’ and Kyle Abraham’s ‘Optional Family: A divertissement’ – and the dancers responded with burnished performances, joyful and committed

Yasmine Naghdi and Ryoichi Hirano in ‘Within the Golden Hour’, The Royal Ballet (Bill Cooper)

The Royal Ballet returns to the stage with world and company premieres, a commitment to the future – and with a wave of love. The socially distanced audience offer up a standing ovation as the lights go down. The dancers respond with burnished performances, joyful and committed.

Next year, the in-demand American choreographer Kyle Abraham will create a new work for the company. In the meantime, he made this short trio while getting to know the dancers. Optional Family: A divertissement starts with letters of sniping resentment between a long-married couple. The voiceover gets a laugh, but sets limits on the dance that follows: these relationships seem richer, more ambiguous than the joke.

Natalia Osipova and Marcelino Sambé are fiercely glamorous. Stanisław Węgrzyn might be one of the letter’s “three ungrateful children”, but his silky moves suggest a figure of temptation, of what lies beyond. The dancing is explosive and unpredictable, Abraham responding to ballet technique but drawing on his own eclectic contemporary style. Osipova whirls away from Sambé, arms coiling with seething energy, her speed against his velvet flow of movement.