Matthew Ball

Matthew Ball (born 14 December 1993) is an English ballet dancer and is currently a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet.

Ball was born in December 1993 in Liverpool.

His mother is a GCSE dance teacher and his father works in arts education.

He started dancing at the age of 6, entered the Royal Ballet Lower School at 11 and moved to the Upper School at 16.

He graduated in 2013, but was unable to take part in the graduation performance because of knee surgery.

Ball joined The Royal Ballet in the 2013/14 season, became a First Artist in 2015, Soloist in 2016 and First Soloist in 2017.

In March 2018, he was tasked with replacing an injured David Hallberg mid-show as Albrecht in Giselle, even though he had only danced the role once, and had never danced in a full-length ballet before with Natalia Osipova, the ballerina playing the title role.

Ball's performance was given an ovation by the audience and praised in the review by The Times.

Ball was promoted to principal dancer in July that year.

In December, he took time off from the Royal Ballet for 32 performances as the lead swan in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake at the Sadler's Wells Theatre.

He has danced lead roles in ballets such as Swan Lake, La Bayadère, Don Quixote, Ashton's Marguerite and Armand and McGregor's Infra.

He had less than two weeks to prepare his debut as Crown Prince Rudolf in MacMillan's Mayerling to replace another injured dancer.

He has also created roles in new works such as Wheeldon's Corybantic Games, Marriott's The Unknown Soldier, and Marston's The Cellist.

As of 2018, Ball lives in Clapham, London.

Ball's repertoire with the Royal Ballet includes:

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Later that year, in the first series of performances since the Royal Opera House's closure due to the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic, he and Mayara Magri performed a pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon's Within the Golden Hour, having learnt it in five days.

In 2020, Ball was featured in the BBC documentary Men at the Barre.