Every season opening is full of anticipation for the company and its public. The Polish National Ballet began its 2026–27 season with a sumptuous gala conceived as a celebration of classical and contemporary dance and as a journey through dance history and its present. The theatre showcased the company in all its aspects, starting from the junior ballet and corps de ballet to its coryphées, soloists, and principal dancers. Three guest couples, those included Bleuenn Battistoni and Paul Marque, Mayara Magri and Matthew Ball, and Nicoletta Manni and Timofej Andrijashenko, representing, respectively, the Paris Opera Ballet, The Royal Ballet, and La Scala Ballet, gave the gala the scale of a truly international event. Rightly so, considering the two hundred years of classical dance in Poland, about which European audiences know regrettably all too little.

The gala offered the public in the theatre as well as too much wider audiences across the country, since the event was televised nationally, an opportunity to deepen their encounter with the artists of the Polish National Ballet and gain a glimpse into the history of dance and some of its best secrets. Katarzyna Sanocka, formerly a ballerina herself, was a remarkable host for the evening. Her introductions to the dancers and choreographies invited the public to watch both older and newer works with a greater understanding of their stylistic differences.
It is easy for those already initiated into ballet’s floating beauty to admire it. Learning more about its history strengthens this admiration. The gala was interspersed with witty videos created by Ewa Krasucka. The author chose the French ballerina Marie Camargo and the choreographer and Enlightenment thinker Jean-Georges Noverre as her playful guides, traveling back through history and looking toward ballet’s future in an episode in which they visit the School of the Polish National Ballet, a cradle for future stars.

¨The Kingdom of the Shades¨ from the third act of La Bayadère, choreographed by Petipa about a century and a half ago, is a masterpiece of visual harmony and a serious test for any company. Opening the gala with this piece, which demonstrates the beauty and power of the corps de ballet, established the direction of the evening: it brought into the limelight the growth of the company as a whole and the diversity of its mastery. At the end of the first part of the evening, the corps de ballet and soloists danced the no less demanding finale of George Balanchine’s Symphony in C, to music by Georges Bizet, calling attention to their precision and musicality in mastering a neoclassical repertoire of the highest definition. The company’s excellent ballet masters and mistresses deserve full credit for training the dancers in the studio for this spotless performance onstage.


In the finale, the whole company returned to the stage for the premiere of Krzysztof Pastor’s version of Ravel’s Boléro, music that has invited numerous interpretations ever since it was commissioned by Ida Rubinstein and choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska in 1928. Pastor’s Boléro explored the powerful effect of synchronicity in the movements of the corps de ballet, echoing the music’s repetitive modulation. Yet the struggle for dominance in passion between the female and male characters, performed by the stunning Chinara Alizade and Vladimir Yaroshenko, both first soloists of the Polish National Ballet, remained unresolved, both choreographically and emotionally. In many ways, the dancers accompanied the orchestra’s excellent performance of Boléro, led by Yoel Gamzou, music director of the Polish National Opera. Throughout the evening, Gamzou, essentially an opera conductor, highlighted the richness and poetic textures of ballet music.

The gala’s program included hallmarks of the Romantic and classical repertoire, such as the pas de deux from the second act of Giselle, performed with fine attention to stylistic accent by Jaeeun Jung and Ryota Kitai, first soloists of the company, and the wedding pas de deux from Don Quixote, danced boisterously by Mai Kageyama and Bogdan Verbovoy, first dancers of the company. These pieces are usually favoured by a public that nonetheless has a keen interest in new paths in dance as well.

Recent neoclassical choreography formed a strong component of the gala. Battistoni and Marque presented “On the Nature of Daylight,” choreographed by the British choreographer David Dawson, while Manni and Andrijashenko danced “Luminous,” choreographed by the Hungarian choreographer András Lukács. Both pieces, created to music by Max Richter, vividly illustrated the balletic vision of the last decade, which has emphasized the flawless continuum of movement and plasticity of form, supported by the airy minimalism of the music. Thematic abstraction, though inviting to the eye, leaves very little space in which to distinguish the personalities of these remarkable dancers from Paris and Milan. In contrast, Battistoni and Marque demonstrated all the magical qualities of the French school in the third-act pas de deux from La Belle au bois dormant in Nureyev’s version, while Manni and Andrijashenko appeared genuinely inspired by Tchaikovsky’s music in the pas de deux from The Nutcracker, choreographed by Jean-Christophe Maillot.

The full emotional power of dance inspired by music emerged in the short ballet Bare With Me, choreographed by Matthew Ball, who danced it with Mayara Magri. Ball is an emerging choreographer of great potential, not only because he restores storytelling and passion to dance, but also because he understands dance as theatre and therefore cares more for the compassion of the public than for the abstract beauty of the steps he composes. His inventive use of simple props onstage also adds a necessary theatrical dimension to his choreography. It was a real treat for the public to see the world premiere of this ballet in Warsaw, not least because Jean Sibelius’s Malinconia, written for cello and piano and the inspiration for Ball’s choreography, was orchestrated and conducted by Yoel Gamzou, music director of the Polish National Opera. Ball and Magri moved the public again with their ardent and uncompromising interpretation of the bedroom pas de deux from Manon in MacMillan’s choreography to music by Jules Massenet.

This brilliant evening became a true celebration of dance through the creative programming of Krzysztof Pastor, director of the Polish National Ballet. It was a gala that presented not only the talents of dancers and choreographers, but above all the magnitude of the art of dance in its many dimensions: historical, stylistic, and educational-all seen through the prism of the Polish National Ballet’s coming season.