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Edward Watson to retire as Royal Ballet principal dancer

He has stunned Covent Garden audiences as the doomed Prince Mayerling, a tormented Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Lewis Carroll’s bewigged White Rabbit and a gloop-smeared Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. But after 15 years as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, Edward Watson is to retire and join its team of coaches.

As répétiteur, Watson will lend his knowledge and experience to prepare dancers for the broad range of the company’s repertory. He will remain a principal for the coming season, with a final performance in Wayne McGregor’s highly anticipated new creation, The Dante Project, which has been postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Edward Watson as Gregor Samsa and Laura Day as Grete Samsa in a 2011 Royal Opera House production of Metamorphosis.
Edward Watson as Gregor Samsa and Laura Day as Grete Samsa in a 2011 Royal Opera House production of The Metamorphosis. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Watson, who trained at the Royal Ballet School and graduated into the Royal Ballet in 1994, performed in McGregor’s first work for the company, Symbiont(s), in 2000. He has since taken on several other McGregor classics, such as Chroma and Woolf Works, as well as forging collaborations with choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Arthur Pita, and excelling in the repertory of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan.

The director of the Royal Ballet, Kevin O’Hare, said: “Edward’s artistic sensibility and extraordinary physicality have made him one of the most distinctive performers of his generation, and indeed in the Royal Ballet’s history, ushering in a new era of possibility for men in ballet. His expressive versatility and openness for collaboration have proved an inspiration.”

Making the announcement at the end of the Royal Ballet’s 2019-20 season, which was disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak, O’Hare said their programme had been “a shorter one than planned but one in which our dancers shone brightly”.