Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For nearly 30 years, London City Ballet has been just a ticket stub in a balletgoer’s scrapbook, but the fondly remembered company has risen again this summer with a flavoursome blend of ballets old and new. The programme has been touring since July — everywhere from Bath to Beijing — and this week it returned to its home city with a four-night run at Sadler’s Wells.The original company was founded in 1978, brainchild of Durban-born dancer Harold King. The troupe’s chief aim was to take classical dance to parts that bigger, more unwieldy companies could not reach and it won enthusiastic (and highly photogenic) support from the dance-mad Diana, Princess of Wales. The company bourréed its last in 1996. King’s small but perfectly formed Swan Lake (just a dozen swans, if memory serves) became the Flying Dutchman of the touring circuit, but his mixed bills were packed with modern classics and new commissions. This programme, Resurgence, selected by LCB’s director and re-animator Christopher Marney, is faithful to that tradition.After a brief slideshow to remind us of the rise and fall of the original company, the quintuple bill kicks off with Ashley Page’s 1993 Larina Walz, set to the lilting (taped) melody from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. During the 1990s the dread words “new Ashley Page ballet” were usually synonymous with corny, combative pairwork and fussy sets (anyone remember Bloodlines?), but this five-couple tights’n’tutus ballet is a smoothly crafted, unabashedly musical confection. The choreography shows off Marney’s dancers and emphasises their classical credentials in a seamless flow of duets packed with pretty promenades and nerveless travelling lifts.It was followed by a precious rarity: Kenneth MacMillan’s Ballade, created in 1972 and — amazingly — never danced since. Set to Fauré’s Ballade for Piano and Orchestra, this exquisite pas de quatre was a love letter to Deborah (MacMillan’s wife-to-be) and shows three young men vying for the attentions of guest superstar Alina Cojocaru. Among the solos, duos and trios, MacMillan includes a sequence in which she is passed adoringly from man to man, innocently foreshadowing the brothel scene in Manon that he would create two years later. Finally, Cojocaru makes her choice (dishy and attentive Alejandro Virelles) and his two rivals spin wingwards with their chairs, leaving a table for two.The languid but fiendishly difficult pas de deux from MacMillan’s 1966 Concerto (smoothly danced by Isadora Bless and Joseph Taylor) is the highlight of the second half. Such thoroughbred material can unbalance a programme. Marney’s Eve, an attempt to rethink the Garden of Eden from a female perspective, felt flimsy and overwrought in such company, despite a strong performance by Álvaro Madrigal as the slip-sliding Serpent. Arielle Smith’s Five Dances would have made a far stronger finale. Smith’s six-hander is powered by John Adams’s John’s Book of Alleged Dances and showcases the talents and idiosyncrasies of Marney’s dancers. Arthur Wille, whose paper-plane jetés caught the eye in Page’s piece, unravels iceworthy pirouettes and chaînés and the whole ballet is a cascade of combinations that deftly dodge the usual partnering clichés. A very bright beginning.★★★☆☆To September 14, sadlerswells.com, then Joyce Theatre, New York, September 17-22, www.joyce.org
