Birmingham Royal Ballet announces 2025 - 26 season including the return of Black Sabbath - The Ballet

Today, announcing Birmingham Royal Ballet’s 2025 - 26 Season, the Company’s Director Carlos Acosta said: ‘Following the Company’s most successful Nutcracker season ever, preparations for our spring 2025 tour of Cinderella are well underway but already we are looking ahead and I am so happy to announce the return of two of the more recent jewels in BRB’s crown, Black Sabbath – The Ballet and Don Quixote. Amongst many achievements, these productions are two of which I am possibly most proud as I mark five years with the Company. I continue to honour the memory of my close collaborator and CEO Caroline Miller in my first season without her at my side, and we all remain positive and excited about what lies ahead.‘

Black Sabbath – The Ballet had its European premiere in Rotterdam last June and BRB is thrilled to be taking the show to the Virginia Arts Festival (28-30 May) and the Kennedy Center Washington (4-8 June) before it has its homecoming to open the 2025-26 season in Birmingham at the Hippodrome  (18-27 Sep)  to kick off a tour that sees its first ever visit to the Lowry, Salford (8-11 Oct) before returning to Plymouth Theatre Royal (16-18 Oct) and Sadler’s Wells, London (22-25 Oct) finishing with a Scottish premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre (30 Oct-1 Nov). The show was a complete sell-out when it premiered in Autumn 2023, bringing heavy metal fans to ballet for the first time, and this return will see some updated interview audio and even sharper sound design to ensure the dial can be turned up to 11!

A full-length, three-act, Ballet Now commission, Black Sabbath - The Ballet was created by a host of international talent including lead Swedish choreographer Pontus Lidburg, Cuban designer Alexandre Arrechea, Tony Award winning composer Christopher Austin with additional choreographers Raúl Reinoso and Cassi Abranches and composers Marko Nyberg and Sun Keting. Dramaturgy is by Richard Thomas and lighting design is by KJ. 

The 8 Black Sabbath tracks featured are: Paranoid (Paranoid, 1970);  Ironman (Paranoid, 1970); War Pigs (Paranoid, 1970); Black Sabbath (Black Sabbath, 1970); Solitude (Master of Reality, 1971);  Orchid (Master of Reality, 1971); Laguna Sunrise (Vol 4, 1972) and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, 1973). The music has been re-orchestrated for the Royal Ballet Sinfonia with new compositions inspired by Black Sabbath also performed live by the orchestra and live on stage guitarist Mark Hayward reprises his role.

Summer 2025 also sees the Company’s return to Japan with Cinderella (27 - 29 June) and The Sleeping Beauty (20-22 June) visiting Tokyo Bunka Kaikan before the latter visits Osaka (2 July) and Nagoya (5 July).  

Alongside The Sleeping Beauty BRB’s digital project will be part of the highly prestigious Osaka Expo with an exhibition of photos by Clive Booth, inspired by the Company’s research into the effects of Relative Energy Deficiency in dancers running from 25 to 1 July. Our presence at the Expo will feature a performance and presentation panel on 25 July to discuss the photographic exhibition that has followed for our dancers for the last year and explores their physical and mental well-being.

The Spring 2026 season begins in Birmingham with the return of Carlos Acosta’s production of Don Quixote, kicking off a UK-wide tour at the Hippodrome (12-21 Feb) before visiting The Lowry, Salford (5-7 March), Sunderland Empire (12-14 March), Plymouth Theatre Royal (18-21 March), then Southampton Mayflower (15-18 April). Finally, with more details to be announced, BRB will be returning to the Royal Opera House with Don Quixote as part of their Summer Season in 2026 after more than a decade-long absence.

BRB last performed Don Quixote in Spring 2022 in the shadow of Omicron. Although the tour was successful, it is felt that the circumstances were less than ideal and that this timely revival can now flourish from an altogether more stable and positive context. Don Quixote will bring the vibrancy of Spanish sunshine to audiences who themselves may now have more of a spring in their step. In 2022 the production was filmed for cinema and broadcast on BBC TV where it has been seen by over 95,000 people, indicating an appetite for this joyous, visually sumptuous ballet to showcase the company’s technical mastery and comic timing!

Sir Peter Wright's The Nutcracker was his gift to the City of Birmingham when Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet moved to the city in 1990 and it remains one of the world's most spectacular presentations of this festive tale. After breaking all previous box office records in the Birmingham 2024 run, which introduced the first-ever Relaxed Performance of the production that was so popular it will return again in 2025.The Nutcracker’s Birmingham run begins on 21 November playing through to 13 December. The Royal Albert Hall spectacular presentation of The Nutcracker returns this year (29 - 31 December 2025).

A celebration: Sir Peter Wright Centenary will take place at the Birmingham Hippodrome on Wednesday 18 February 2026 when Sir Peter will be in his 100th year (he turns 99 in November 2025). The evening will consist of highlights from Sir Peter's many brilliant classical productions for the Company plus the BRB's first performance of Kurt Jooss's The Green Table since the early 1990s when Sir Peter himself brought it into the repertory. Sir Peter started his career in Ballet Jooss and The Green Table is a work he greatly admires.

BRB2, Birmingham Royal Ballet's second company, embarks on its fourth UK tour in Spring 2026 with dates to be announced. 'Pinsharp and personality laden', BRB2 brings together some of the world's very best young dancers, the international stars of the future, to share their incredible talent. Carlos Acosta’s Ballet Celebration features highlights from the repertory of Serge Diaghilev's troupe of rebel dancers, musicians and designers who fled Russia to set a new standard in creativity that inspires and resonates across the world of dance to this day. The programme includes The Firebird, Spectre de la Rose, Les Sylphides and Scheherazade. These performances are possible thanks to the support of Oak Foundation and are supported by Charles Holloway, Jerwood Foundation, The Kirby Laing Foundation, The Linbury Trust and the Noel Coward Foundation.

In June (18 - 20)  BRB will present a 20th-Century Masterpieces triple bill at the Birmingham Hippodrome. The programme includes The Green Table (Choreography: Kurt Jooss; Music: Fritz Cohen); George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations (Music: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky), and finishes with Sir Frederick Ashton’s Birthday Offering (Music: Alexander Glazunov. Arr: Robert Irving).

Bringing together three choreographic giants the programme shows how ballet can thrill through sheer artistry, and also explore dark themes about man’s inhumanity to man. BRB’s founder choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton made Birthday Offering for the then Sadler’s Wells Theatre Ballet (in the year they became The Royal Ballet) to celebrate their 25th anniversary in 1956 on a dazzling cast of dancers that included Margot Fonteyn. The Green Table is considered Kurt Jooss’s masterwork – created in 1932 he foreshadows the ultimate futility of the peace negotiations of the decade with Death in turn becoming the dance partner of each of the characters. George Balanchine’s joyous Theme and Variations drips with gilded grandeur, evoking, in Balanchine’s own words ‘a great period in classical dancing when Russian ballet flourished with the aid of Tschaikovsky’s music’ – created in 1947, it is a glorious celebration in dance with which to round off the programme.