Companies Defining the Genre
The houses whose artistic identity, training methods, and repertory have shaped what contemporary ballet looks like today - and where its next generation of choreographers keeps coming from.
In the classical repertoire, a Swan Lake is recognizably the same ballet wherever it is staged. Contemporary work is different: most of it is made on specific dancers, licensed carefully, and taught to new casts by stagers who worked with the choreographer. That makes the company - who it hires, how it trains them, and whom it commissions - part of the work itself. The ten companies below show the main ways that has played out.
✦ Three Kinds of Company ✦
The Originators
Companies whose house style became a reference point for everyone else. Nederlands Dans Theater defined contemporary ballet as a genre of its own and trained a generation of its dancers; Batsheva gave the field the Gaga movement language; and Rambert, Britain's oldest dance company, made the clearest institutional move from ballet to contemporary dance.
Classical Institutions, Remade
Companies that kept their ballet-trained base but rebuilt their identity around new work. Scottish Ballet turned toward bold contemporary theatre, Ballet BC reinvented itself and helped shape Crystal Pite, and GöteborgsOperans Danskompani uses the resources of an opera house for large-scale, immersive dance.
Independent Voices
Companies built around a founder's vision or a commissioning model. Alonzo King LINES Ballet abstracts the classical line; Complexions fuses ballet with hip-hop, jazz, and modern dance; BalletX exists to commission new choreographers; and Sydney Dance Company carries an athletic contemporary style around Australia and abroad.