The Nutcracker and La Bayadère were among the earliest productions that the academy put on in 1981. Three years later, the company’s The Nutcracker went from an abridged version to a full-length production. Since then, it has remained a cherished Christmas tradition of the company.

The company was official renamed as the Hong Kong Ballet on November 9, 1990. From 1989 to the end of the 1990s, the company moved on to tackle some of the ballet canon’s most challenging works, such as André Prokovsky’s Swan Lake and Petal Miller-Ashmole’s The Snow Queen. It also commissioned original productions, including Wayne Eagling’s The Last Emperor and Domy Reiter-Soffer’s Emperor and The Nightingale—both productions drew on Chinese themes and were commissioned to mark the year of the 1997 handover.

In case you missed it: ‘Swan Lake’ gets a contemporary remake in Hong Kong Ballet’s production in May

Starting from the 1990s, the company began to tour places, showcasing its talents on global stages. In 1992, it performed excerpts from Don Quixote in Canada and Fest Polonnaise in Shanghai; in 1993, Unknown Territory in the US; and The Last Emperor in the US and Canada in 2001, Singapore and North America in 2004 and Spain in 2005.

The company continued to bring more works that celebrate a myriad of stories from around the world into its repertoire in the following decade: Nacho Duato’s Castrati (performed in 2012), which featured nine male dancers portraying castrato singers; Jiri Kylian’s Sechs Tanze (performed in 2017), based on Mozart’s humour and musical brilliance; Nina Ananiashvili’s Don Quixote (performed in 2017), based on Cervantes’s satirical novel on chivalric ideals; and Septime Webre’s The Great Gatsby (premiered in Asia in 2019), which was inspired by F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel on the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age in the US.

The Hong Kong Ballet branched out into integrating ballet into the local community through outreach programmes and educational initiatives. For instance, Ballet in the City was a project in 2018 that featured pop-up performances, podcasts and dance-focused films to make ballet—once thought to be the domain of the privileged—accessible to a wider audience. The company also did Dancing to Hong Kong’s Heartbeat, a series of interactive ballet workshops and cultural activities for underserved families in 2023 and 2024.

By staging shows outside the theatre, the company made ballet more accessible and relatable to the city’s people.

Today, Hong Kong Ballet comprises approximately 50 dancers from various backgrounds. As well as developing younger talent and audiences through its educational programmes both in its new studio called Hong Kong Academy of Ballet (which opened in September 2024) and across the city, the company continues to further its excellence in the arts.

Lately, the company’s choreographer-in-residence Ricky Hu and his wife Mai Jing Wen are hard at work creating the new piece The Butterfly Lovers, which is set for premiere on October 18, 2024. The company has also been adapting classic ballets with a modern twist, and bringing them to the world stage, such as Alice (in Wonderland) in Washington DC in 2020 and Romeo + Juliet in New York City earlier this year.

With its various efforts, HKB continues to play a vital role in Hong Kong’s cultural landscape.

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