World Ballet Day 2026: Step Inside the World's Ballet Studios

Most mornings, the studio doors at the Royal Opera House stay closed. On Thursday 29 October 2026 they open to everyone. At 11.30am Irish time, the dancers of The Royal Ballet take their places at the barre for company class, the quiet hour of pliés and tendus that begins every working day of a dancer's life. You can watch all of it, live and free, from your kitchen table.

That is World Ballet Day. Once a year, ballet companies around the world let the cameras into the rooms audiences never see. No costumes, no curtain call. Just class, rehearsal, the coach who stops the pianist to fix the line of an arm, and the run-through that finally comes right.

This year's theme is one every ballet student in Ireland will recognise: How Stories Are Made. It is a day about teachers.

An art passed from hand to hand

Ballet lives in people more than on paper. The great roles are handed down in the studio, from the dancer who first performed them, to the coach who remembers how they were made, to the young dancer at the front of the room today. The National Ballet of Canada puts this year's theme as storytelling "both onstage and behind the scenes, and the preparation that makes creation possible."

The Royal Ballet has built its whole three-hour stream around it. After class, the cameras move into the rehearsal studios, where former dancers and coaches lead rehearsals and talk about the roles they once danced. Many of them learned those roles from the choreographers themselves. The company calls it "the living tradition of multi-generational coaching, shared artistry and storytelling", and if you have ever watched a teacher demonstrate a port de bras she was taught forty years ago, you will know exactly what that means.

Students of The Royal Ballet School are part of the day too, alongside dancers from Birmingham Royal Ballet. And that is where this story comes home.

A centenary with Wicklow roots

The Royal Ballet School is 100 years old this year, and its founder was Irish. Dame Ninette de Valois was born Edris Stannus in 1898 at Baltyboys House, near Blessington in County Wicklow. She danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, then built British ballet almost from nothing: the school, the company that became The Royal Ballet, and the touring company that became Birmingham Royal Ballet.

She never forgot Dublin. In 1927, at W. B. Yeats's suggestion, she set up the Abbey Theatre School of Ballet, which ran until 1933 and staged new ballets to music by Irish composers. The students you will see in The Royal Ballet's stream on 29 October train at a school founded 100 years ago by a woman from Wicklow.

Start the day with The Royal Ballet at 11.30am

London is on Irish time, so The Royal Ballet's stream is the easiest one to catch. It opens at 11.30am with company class, live from the Royal Opera House, which the company calls "a much-loved highlight of World Ballet Day". Kristen McNally, one of its Principal Character Artists, presents, and the stream runs for three hours.

If there is a young dancer in your house, watch the class with them. They will know more of it than you expect: pliés first, then tendus, the slow adagio in the centre, and the jumps building at the end. The steps are the same as their own Saturday class. The speed and the height are not.

Watch on the Royal Ballet and Opera YouTube channel or the company's World Ballet Day page. Two more versions run alongside the main stream, one with British Sign Language and one with audio description. In the Republic, 29 October falls in the school mid-term break, so the whole family can watch it live.

Then follow the day around the world

Forty-three ballet companies, schools and dance organisations are taking part, each sharing its own films and streams. The National Ballet of Canada will take viewers behind the scenes of The Beginning of Forever, a new work by its Resident Choreographer David Dawson, through conversations with Dawson, composer Peter Gregson, Music Director David Briskin and Artistic Director Hope Muir. It will also premiere a film of Dawson's pas de deux On the Nature of Daylight, danced by Principal Dancers Genevieve Penn Nabity and Ben Rudisin.

Closer to home, English National Ballet, Northern Ballet and the Royal Academy of Dance are all on Irish time. Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Dutch National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet and The Royal Danish Ballet are an hour ahead. Across the Atlantic you will find American Ballet Theatre, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and a 10am start in New York is 2pm here. The Australian Ballet and Royal New Zealand Ballet are eleven and thirteen hours ahead, so their day unfolds while Ireland sleeps.

Twelve years of opening the doors

The first World Ballet Day, on 1 October 2014, was one long relay. Five companies, The Australian Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Canada and San Francisco Ballet, each streamed live from their own studios for four hours, passing the link from Melbourne to Moscow to London to Toronto to San Francisco as the morning moved around the world. Viewers were invited to film their own pirouette, wherever they were, and send it in.

By its tenth birthday in 2023, more than 60 companies were taking part. David Hallberg of The Australian Ballet described it as a chance "to see the beauty of the ballet, expressed through the intimate lens of a camera." Tamara Rojo of San Francisco Ballet spoke of honouring "ballet as a living art and universal language."

After a pause in 2024, it came back in November 2025 under the theme Access Becomes Art. The Royal Ballet premiered a new six-minute work made with the blind artist Devon Healey, and at Dutch National Ballet, dancer Luca Abdel-Nour made a new piece for the wheelchair dancer Eli Bras. "World Ballet Day has always been about opening doors," said Kevin O'Hare, Director of The Royal Ballet. This year, the doors open onto the rehearsal room.

Make it part of mid-term

Put the class on in the morning. If it leaves someone wanting to dance rather than watch, there are ballet camps all through mid-term week. The Nutcracker guide has this year's Irish performances, and ballet classes will find a school near you.

And on the Saturday after, when class begins in a studio in Cork or Sligo or Belfast, it will begin the way it did at Covent Garden on Thursday: at the barre, with a plié.