Ismene Brown

Black magic

Plus: Royal Ballet's enthralling 30-year-old production of Giselle remains a living treasure, especially now that a thrilling partnership has emerged between Muntagirov and Nunez

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  • Ballet Black: Triple Bill

    Barbican Theatre, and touring until 22 June

  • Giselle

    Royal Opera House, in rep until 15 April

Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was a witch who would leave him forever haunted, sick and bereft.

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