Awards & Nominations

About Us

Founded in 2001 by Cassa Pancho OBE, Ballet Black is the UK and Europe’s first Black professional neoclassical ballet company. It was established with a transformative vision for classical ballet, encapsulated by Pancho’s motto: Change Not Trend. That ethos underpins a mission to showcase diversity on stage and open the art form to Black and Asian dancers, while also changing the profession behind the scenes and the audiences in front of it.

Over more than two decades, Ballet Black has become a pivotal force in reshaping British ballet. It has performed in over 100 venues and built the most diverse audience in the UK for classical ballet. Its position allows it to tell stories other companies cannot, and to champion the costume makers, writers, poets and musicians who find a sense of belonging in its work, enriching its productions and widening the creative landscape.

Since its inception, Cassa Pancho has personally commissioned over 70 new works, supporting female choreographers from the earliest stages of their careers and giving choreographic talent an exceptional group of dancers and a platform to match. Ballet Black stands as an exceptional dance company in its own right, and is the first and only UK company to have won all three of the Critics’ Circle company awards.

The company has also produced landmark firsts for Black artists in dance: the Olivier Award for Best New Dance Production (Ingoma, 2020, choreographed by Mthuthuzeli November), and the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance (Isabela Coracy as Nina Simone in Nina: By Whatever Means, 2024). In 2022, Ballet Black swept all four dance categories at the Black British Theatre Awards.

Changing the sector

Ballet Black’s most lasting impact is not measured on its own stage. It is measured in the artists it has developed who now shape the profession from within – in the studios, on the stages, and in the training schools that once had no place for them.

In the training of the next generation. Ballet Black alumni now teach across the UK’s leading conservatoires. Several teach at The Royal Ballet School; others work with The Place, Trinity Laban, RADA, Central and Mountview. Where a young dancer of colour once had almost no one who looked like them at the front of the room, they now do – inside the institutions that train the profession.

On the main stage. Mthuthuzeli November joined Ballet Black as an apprentice and became a choreographer whose work is now made for main stages, including the Royal Ballet & Opera. Work developed through BB:PULSE, our platform for emerging choreographers of colour, has travelled into the wider repertoire.

In leadership, and beyond ballet. Ballet Black artists have gone on to lead and mentor across the sector – directing training organisations, and coaching young dancers in major stage productions including Billy Elliot in the West End and Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre. Others carry the company’s example beyond ballet entirely, into West End theatre, screen, and casting for film, advertising and music. The influence reaches internationally, to companies and schools across Europe and the United States, including the School of American Ballet.

In the fabric of the art form. In 2018 Ballet Black worked with Freed of London to create the UK’s first pointe shoes and tights in a range of skin tones, ending the nightly ritual of dancers painting pink shoes to match their skin. They are now a standard product line, used across the sector – a permanent change to ballet’s infrastructure that began in Ballet Black’s studio.

None of this came from campaigning. It came from developing artists to a standard that the institutions which once warned dancers away from Ballet Black now hire them to teach. That is what Change Not Trend means in practice.

The Ballet Black Junior School

A year after launching the company, Pancho established the Ballet Black Junior School in 2002, to secure the future of Black ballet dancers and make the art form accessible to children and families who felt ballet was not for them.

The school offers classes for children aged three to eighteen, both non-syllabus and Royal Academy of Dance Syllabus Examination classes, across three London sites in Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush and East London. Recognising the importance of representation, students are taught by Black and brown role models, including Pancho and company dancers. The school is open to all children.

It has educated hundreds, including multigenerational families, with several students progressing to institutions such as the Central School of Ballet, Rambert and London Studio Centre. In 2025 Ruby Runham became the first Junior School alumna to join the professional company – the pathway from a first children’s class to a professional contract, completed for the first time.

An essential part of the landscape

As Ballet Black enters its third decade, a company whose original ambition was to become wonderfully obsolete – to make itself unnecessary by changing the sector around it – has instead become an essential part of the dance landscape. Not despite the change it has helped bring about, but because of it.