Happy World Ballet Day 2025!
Today is World Ballet Day 2025 – whoever and wherever you are, it is time to join the celebration and the conversation.
After pressing pause for 2024, the world’s most exciting online ballet event is back for its eleventh year! Let’s devote twenty-four hours to being grateful for the art form we love and the fact that leading ballet companies are once again uniting to provide us with a whole day of live-streamed content for free.
This year’s edition is raising the barre by striving to do more than make ballet available to audiences worldwide. It is building on over a decade of digital innovation by moving from its usual theme of behind-the-scenes access to a theme focused on promoting access and inclusion in ways that can make dance a welcoming space for all.
Access Becomes Art: World Ballet Day 2025 will concentrate on increasing radical accessibility within ballet by inviting artists and audiences to engage with the art form using transformative new approaches. Over thirty ballet companies (including The Australian Ballet, The Royal Ballet and San Francisco Ballet) are going to share how they are exploring social questions about accessibility and co-creating work with disabled artists in order to broaden the ways we all experience dance.
What can ballet be and mean when we embrace community, creativity and fresh collaborative perspectives? How can our responses to the inner world of dance – perceived and inhabited by participants and spectators through sensation, sound and storytelling – be reimagined, redefined and reinterpreted? Prepare to be delighted and inspired by broadcasts of classes, rehearsals, interviews and newly commissioned works.
World Ballet Day: a social media moment
Each year, everyone is encouraged to get involved in World Ballet Day by sharing their own photographs, videos and thoughts online.
Content should be shared on social media using #WorldBalletDay for a chance to be featured on the official livestream.
Participating companies:
Note that this list is subject to change.
Asia
Ballet Indonesia Foundation
Bangkok City Ballet
Korean National Ballet
North America
American Ballet Theatre
Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico
BalletMet
Boston Ballet
Charlotte Ballet
Houston Ballet
Kansas City Ballet
Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal
Louisville Ballet
Miami City Ballet
National Ballet of Canada
Sacramento Ballet
San Francisco Ballet
Texas Ballet Theatre
South America
São Paulo Dance Company
Europe
Acosta Dance Foundation
Ballet Opéra de Paris
Birmingham Royal Ballet
Dutch National Ballet
Estonian National Ballet
Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD)
The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet
Polish National Ballet
Wiener Staatsballett/Vienna State Ballet
Oceania
The Australian Ballet
Celebrate World Ballet Day 2025
World Ballet Day 2025 is being live-streamed via each participating company’s website or social media platforms.
Watch the entire online event live by visiting the World Ballet Day website.
Use the hashtag #WorldBalletDay on social media to share the joy of ballet.
*Featured photograph is of visually impaired amateur dancer Takashi Kikuchi and Royal Ballet first soloist Leo Dixon in rehearsal. Takashi Kikuchi and Leo Dixon are dancing together, side by side, in a ballet studio. Dixon is resting his right arm and his head on Kikuchi’s left shoulder. He is raising his left arm, looking at his palm intently. Kikuchi, eyes closed, is lifting both of his arms up, bent at the elbow. Photography by Andrej Uspenski.
Georgina Butler is an editor, a dance writer and a ballet teacher.
