There's a moment in Encounters when a ballerina in a Spidey mask launches herself across the stage like she's escaping a skyscraper, and the audience collectively forgets to breathe. That's the thing about this production—it's not trying to impress you with perfection. It's trying to wake you up.
The Royal Ballet has always been the polite one at the ballet party, the one that follows all the rules and wears the correct leotard. So when they drop a show titled Encounters that careens between pristine classical lines and what can only be described as theatrical chaos, you pay attention. This isn't their careful, curated self. This is them letting loose.
The evening opens with something that shouldn't work—a nod to classic hip-hop, those sharp, percussive movements born from city corners and boomboxes. But here, in the Royal Ballet's hands, it becomes something else entirely. The dancers hit each phrase with surgical precision, their bodies speaking a language that feels both familiar and foreign. It's street dance that went to finishing school. There's a ferocity in those movements, a controlled urgency that makes you realize technique isn't the opposite of groove—they're actually the same thing when done right.
Then comes the segment everyone's whispering about. Picture this: a dancer in full web-slinging regalia, Scaling the air like scaling a building. The choreography grabs ballet's most elegant vocabulary—those fluid extensions, those suspended balances—and plops them into a superhero narrative. The effect is somehow both ridiculous and gorgeous. You're laughing at the audacity, but then a dancer catches a lift with the kind of controlled strength that makes you remember you're watching the Royal Ballet. That's the show's secret weapon. It makes you laugh, then sucker-punches you with beauty when you're not paying attention.
The satirical piece hits different. It's not cute choreography commentary or some vague "society bad" gesture. These dancers are carving through movements that mock the ordinary with surgical precision—the way we check phones during conversations, the performative way we hold coffee cups, the little dances we do to avoid each other's eyes. Your brain registers it as comedy first, then realizes you've been watching something that cuts deeper than any pointe shoe could. Dance doesn't need words to make you uncomfortable. Sometimes a well-placed arm position says everything about how exhausting it is to be human.
What's striking is how effortlessly the production pivots between extremes. One moment you're watching the kind of ballet that makes you hold your breath—that precise, luminous stuff where bodies float like they're refusing to acknowledge gravity exists. The next, some dancer is doing something that belongs in a music video from 2003. The FT called it "careering between the sublime and the ridiculous," and they're not wrong. But here's what nobody's saying: that's exactly why it works. That tension is where the energy lives. Too much elegance becomes precious. Too much chaos becomes noise. Encounters lets you feel both and trusts you to stay seated.
Alastair Macaulay asked the question everyone's thinking: are we watching a new golden age? The honest answer is probably "maybe"—golden ages are only visible in hindsight, when enough time has passed to see the pattern. But watching Encounters, you can feel something shifting. This isn't the Royal Ballet playing safe. This is them leaning into the chaos of what dance can actually be when you stop being afraid of looking foolish.
The real magic happens in the overlap—the moments when hip-hop precision meets ballet elevation, when superhero play meets Swan Lake soul, when satire meets the silent, aching beauty of bodies moving together. That's where the future lives. Not in choosing one style over another, but in letting them crash into each other and seeing what survives.
Encounters ends the way it should: leaving you a little off-balance, not sure exactly what you just experienced but knowing you'll think about it on the train home. That's the mark of something that matters. It doesn't give you answers. It gives you questions worth carrying.
