Northern Ballet has announced Federico Bonelli as the Company’s new Artistic Director.
In 2019 Federico graduated from the Clore Leadership Programme (The Clore Fellowship) and he is a non-executive director and member of the Board of Parents and Carers in Performing Arts (PiPA). He curated the programme for The Royal Ballet activities in Doncaster as part of the Doncaster Creates festival, prior to its pandemic postponement and has coached Royal Ballet repertory, helping to nurture and develop the high standards of the company’s dancers.
He co-facilitates The Royal Ballet’s Inclusivity Focus Group and is a member of the external steering group of Chance to Dance, The Royal Ballet’s outreach talent development programme that aims to remove the barriers to a diverse talent pipeline into vocational training and the ballet and dance profession.
Federico Bonelli is an incredible dancer and it is interesting that he is making this move into a leadership role at Northern Ballet. I hope that he has the will and the drive to shake the company up and drag them into the 21st century - and improve the quality of their productions and dancers. Although commercially apparently successful, much of Northern Ballet's output seems (to me) to be half-baked and mediocre and they need to stop trying to create new narrative ballets and move with the times. Hopefully Bonelli's excellence as a classical dancer and his experience of working with new and modern creative repertoire - as he has done at the Royal Ballet with Wayne McGregor (for example) - will be the perfect grounding for him to achieve great things - perhaps much as Tamara Rojo did when she took their reigns at English National Ballet a decade ago.