“You’ve got to be blindly obstinate, I think.”
Christopher Marney isn’t joking. Running an independent arts organisation in the UK right now is difficult enough; continuing to successfully resurrect a dormant ballet company from scratch—entirely without public subsidy—could seem to some almost masochistic.
When we last spoke in the summer of 2024, the Artistic Director of London City Ballet was plotting the return of the famous Sadler’s Wells resident company from his own home. “You find me at the end of two years of planning, a lot of that around the kitchen table, and now there are flesh and blood dancers in the studio,” he shared at the time. It was an ambitious concept, backed by a formidable heritage, but untested on the modern touring circuit.
Two years later, that obstinacy has paid off.
Following an extensive Resurgence tour across Europe, Asia, and the USA, the company recently secured the Best Independent Company prize at the 2025 Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards. As it enters its third operational year and launches its 2026 season across more than 30 international venues, the company isn’t only surviving a hostile arts funding climate. It is actively scaling up.
“You’ve got to be blindly obstinate, I think.”
“I initially had a plan for three years, and this is year three,” Marney says, speaking between bouts of sorting flight itineraries and rehearsal schedules. “But we are by no means stopping here. We’ve really gathered momentum, and a wonderful number of audiences have built. In the first year, I was wondering who would come, if there would be consistency in touring to different venues. That was built in year two, and I’m really pleased to say we saw a progression in ticket sales at all venues. We also managed to build on our European side of touring. We did more performances in Europe last year than in the UK.”
The Economics of Independent Ballet Touring
Keeping a 25-strong cast and crew on the road demands logistical rigour. Independent companies face a steep fiscal cliff-edge: paying for rehearsal time, choreographers, flights, hotels, and per diems months before a single ticket is scanned at the doors.
“Everyone is struggling really, whether it’s a company or a venue,” Marney notes. “It’s finding the right balancing points.”
Survival, in Chris’s view, relies on cultivating mutually beneficial relationships with receiving houses. Marney points to Bath Theatre Royal and York Theatre Royal as prime examples of how regional venues and independent producers can actually make the spreadsheet work. In York’s case, the relationship has evolved far beyond a transactional hire into formal creative collaboration; the upcoming 2026 season will see York Theatre Royal co-producing the UK premiere of Glen Tetley’s gothic Firebird alongside LCB and Opera de Vichy, France.
“When theatres are considerate about not just the costs, but the facilities that a dance company needs, that’s when it really strikes a good balance,” Marney explains. “We have all of our costs from day one, right up until the end show in that venue, where we see no revenue or income until after those performances. That’s really the struggle for a small company; you pay out and pay out. You rehearse, get the choreographers in, fly them in, pay for the hotel on tour, transport, per diems, and nothing comes back until after that last performance if you’re not funded.”
The solution, it seems, is not demanding cash advances but exchanging tangible assets. If the most expensive element for the ballet is dark time in a theatre for technical rehearsals, the company offsets that burden by offering the venue local community engagement.
“Perhaps we have things like providing workshops and masterclasses locally to schools, or opening up our company classes for audience members to come in—free or low-cost experiences that we can offer,” Marney says. “And physical things like crew, stage space, and space in general that a venue can offer. Once you find that common ground, it makes touring so much easier.”
It also requires venues to understand the basic mechanics of audience demographics. Marney recalls the frustrations of poor administrative foresight on the touring circuit. “Smart programming is important with venues as well. We’ve been to a venue where they had two dance companies coming that year, and they programmed them in the same fortnight,” he notes. “That’s really difficult, because if you’ve got a dance lover in that area of the country, they’re probably not going to come to the theater in consecutive weeks.”
When a venue gets it right, the numbers validate the effort. “We can go somewhere like Bath, do five performances, and they’re really well attended—selling at 70%, which is fantastic for a 1,000-seat theatre.”
Launching the London City Ballet Trainee Programme
This operational stability underpins the company’s latest initiative: a nationwide search for 20 graduate dancers to join a heavily subsidised, year-long trainee programme for the 2026/2027 season.
With the main professional ensemble growing to 16 dancers this year, the influx of 20 trainees represents a massive expansion of the company’s footprint. Aimed at dancers aged 18 to 23 with the right to work in the UK, the scheme is an intervention in a fairly fractured industry pipeline. Without Arts Council money, London City Ballet relies on a tight pool of philanthropists. A dedicated portion of that funding has been ring-fenced to halve the trainee fees, sparing young dancers from university-scale debt for pre-professional training.
“We’ve always had an apprenticeship scheme for two graduate dancers who are paid apprentices; they’re paid like company members, they dance a lot, and they really cut their teeth in the amount of performances that we do,” Marney explains. “This new initiative will be very much a training program. It’s for dancers who feel they still need another year of training before they jump into company life. We’ve managed to subsidise that by half—it’s about 50% of what a university course might cost—because we’ve found donors for that.”
The programme is designed for deep immersion. “Rather than it being about them coming in, dancing, touring, and just being a company member, it’s about them having a base here, their own studio, and their own faculty connected to the company who continue that training for the year. The top-up part is that they get to rehearse with the company and perhaps perform in some of the performances we have.”
Every year, Chris and I agree, conservatoires release technically proficient dancers into a freelance market that relies almost exclusively on personal networks—networks that graduates simply do not possess.
“So few people can find positions in the national companies, but they want to stay in the city they’ve been training in, or the country they were born in, and those opportunities are so few,” he says. “I hope it will end up being a pipeline for dancers to join London City Ballet. But I also hope we’re able to make fantastic industry introductions for these dancers who might then transition into other companies or a freelance career. That is so difficult as a young person because freelancers rely on connections, and graduates don’t have connections yet.”
(You’ll find details on how to apply to the London City Ballet Trainee Programme at the bottom of this article.)
What it Takes to Survive as a Modern Freelance Dancer
For the dancers hoping to secure one of those 20 spots at the May auditions, Marney’s advice is devoid of sentimentality. As he sees it, classical ballet technique alone is unlikely to pay the rent. Today’s London City Ballet repertoire pivots rapidly from the heritage choreography of Kenneth MacMillan and Ashley Page to contemporary creators like Liam Scarlett, Florent Melac, and Tasha Chu.
For the incoming trainees, the stakes are formidably high. The 2026 season features the UK premiere of John Neumeier’s celebrated Ghost Light, with the legendary choreographer working with the company in person. Trainees will also share studio space with returning guest artist Alina Cojocaru. Navigating a room with that level of pedigree requires far more than good turnout.
This varied repertoire serves a dual purpose: sustaining employment and rescuing dance history from the archive. Back in 2024, Marney spoke of the tragedy of lost work, noting that “with dance, if there’s no film or notation made, then it’s lost,” and framing the company’s resurrection as a way to mitigate the “ephemeral nature of theatre and dance.” To perform these rescued works alongside modern commissions, today’s dancers must be highly adaptable.
“Having versatility as a dancer is of the utmost importance now,” Marney asserts. “You don’t really have dancers anymore who just do classical ballet, because companies expect so much more. Dancers who can turn their hand to narrative work, being a character, telling a story, and taking on contemporary forms of movement is really important. In the audition, we’ll do repertoire as well as classical work so we can see the breadth of their techniques.”
He also expects an active, engaged intellect. During a recent talk given to dance students, he asked a basic question: what shows had they seen lately? The resulting silence was a sharp indictment of the passive mindset he intends to eradicate.
“I thought, gosh, as a freelancer, you’ve got to know what you’re auditioning for and why you want to audition for that,” he recalls. “Just wanting to have a job isn’t really good enough, because employers want to hear that you want to work for their company. They want to know that you want to dance the ballets they’re bringing into the repertoire. For young people to hear that and get out of the mindset of ‘I just want to work’ is really important for their future employment.”
Sometimes, career longevity comes down to the simplest of social mechanics. “It makes a really big difference just having the gumption to cross a room during an intermission and saying hello,” say I, and Marney heartily agrees.
Dismantling Traditional Ballet Hierarchies
The trainees who step into the studio in August 2026 will find an environment stripped of traditional, militaristic ballet hierarchies. Marney has discarded the rigid divisions of principal artists and the corps de ballet. In London City Ballet, rank does not dictate casting.
“The strength is in fact that there isn’t a hierarchy to any work that we do here,” he says. “We don’t have an old-fashioned hierarchy that a ballet company was used to. All of the dancers share the roles. We have dancers who are 19 and dancers who are in their 40s. They might be covering or rehearsing together, and ultimately performing the same roles in different performances if they’re right for the casting.”
This egalitarian approach defines the daily operations of the studio. “Not having a hierarchy, having conversations where we’re all sat on the floor—not a group of dancers stretching on the floor and another group on chairs leading from the front—sounds silly, but to me it’s so important,” he explains. “There is a circle of feedback in what we’re doing. When we schedule the week and tour, people have input into what’s working or what’s not. The development and happiness of the company really ride on the fact that everybody feels liberated to speak their mind.”
The company’s palpable onstage connection is a deliberate rejection of the gig-economy grind Marney experienced first-hand.
“When I was a freelance dancer back in the day, we’d have two weeks, then a week off while the set was transported somewhere else, then a two-month run, and then nothing for two months,” he recalls. “It was so fragmented. Every time you came back, there would be different cast members coming in and a brief rehearsal. Everyone gets on and does it, but having the consistency of employment over X amount of weeks in the year really helps, because they build relationships on stage with each other that are priceless.”
The result is a troupe that performs with genuine cohesion, operating more like a classic theatre repertory company than a group of transient contractors.
“One of the comments we often get from industry people or people we know who come see the shows is: ‘You can tell this company is on stage and touring a lot together because they’re so connected. They look at each other on stage. They have genuine connections,'” Marney notes. “They tour all together, and they’re all in every show. That might be common for an acting company, but not so common for dance… It breeds a ground for really connecting, getting on with the work, and doing it because they’re all in the same boat.”
A Repertoire for the Reluctant Plus-One
With the incoming cohort of trainees, Marney is already looking at how to leverage his expanded roster. He is considering using the trainees to bring dance to smaller-scale regional venues that lack the wing space or technical capacity to host the main company’s primary productions. It is a shrewd move: granting the students vital stage hours while actively building new dance audiences in neglected postcodes.
Running a company at this scale means a core team juggling roles that state-funded institutions farm out to entire departments. “If you’re starting off small, you’re not going to have a marketing department, a head of technical theatre, and a wardrobe department,” Marney points out. “It means you have to have the right small group of people working for the same cause, who are versatile and can do different things.”
“One of the comments we often get from industry people or people we know who come see the shows is: ‘You can tell this company is on stage and touring a lot together because they’re so connected. They look at each other on stage. They have genuine connections…”
The ambition to serve the regions is backed by concrete action. “Last year we doubled our reach to towns and cities across the UK… we were proud to give no less than 80% of our performances on tour outside of London,” Marney points out.
Yet, the payoff for that relentless administration is found in the stalls. There is a neat symmetry to the audience currently filling those seats. Two years ago, Marney revealed the deeply personal stakes of the revival, noting, “My first experience of dance was London City Ballet, so this is personally important to me.” Today, seeing that the generational cycle repeat itself is obviously deeply satisfying.
“We have lots of children coming to the performances who are getting their introduction to dance through London City Ballet, which is heartwarming because the same company was my introduction,” he says.
Crucially, the company is also winning over the reluctant plus-ones. “On the other side of things, when adults come who have been dragged along and don’t know whether they like dance, hearing comments like, ‘I didn’t know I enjoyed contemporary dance until I saw this program, thinking it was just going to be classical ballet,’ opening people up to different forms of work has been really enlightening too.”
What began on a kitchen table two years ago is now putting dancers into sustainable jobs, rescuing lost ballets, and converting regional sceptics. As Marney prepares to welcome the next generation into the studio, his verdict on the company’s trajectory is resolute.
“We’re definitely here to stay.” Given how far he’s brought the London City Ballet in only 2 years, I daresay he’s right.
How to Apply
London City Ballet is currently seeking 20 exceptional graduates to step beyond training and immerse themselves in the daily environment of a touring company.
Application: For further information and to submit your application, please visit the London City Ballet Trainee Portal.
Eligibility: Applicants must be aged 18 to 23, at graduate level (or equivalent), and hold the right to live and work in the UK.
Programme Dates: The traineeship runs from 31 August 2026 to 9 July 2027.
Auditions: In-person auditions will be held on 17 May 2026, with offers made by the end of May.
Featured Image: LCB Trainees – image by ASH
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