Staatsballett Hannover

To understand Staatsballett Hannover under Goyo Montero, start with the character who usually stands between the prince and the swans. Montero’s Schwanensee. Rotbarts Geschichte moves Rothbart to the centre of the action and imagines a life for him before the familiar story begins. Tchaikovsky’s music remains, but recognition works differently. The spectator who knows Swan Lake brings a future to the theatre that the character has yet to live through. This was Montero’s first full-length creation for the Hannover ensemble, and it offers a particularly clear example of how the company approaches a classic.

Staatsballett Hannover is the resident ballet ensemble of the Staatsoper. The theatre traces its beginnings to the early post-war years and names Yvonne Georgi, Stephan Thoss, Jörg Mannes and Marco Goecke among the directors who shaped it. Montero succeeded Christian Bloßfeld in the 2025/26 season after seventeen years at the head of the ballet in Nuremberg. He inherited an institution with its own relationship to audiences, an orchestra and an opera stage. The ensemble’s work can also be seen outside that building. In May 2026, Madrid’s Centro Danza Matadero presented the dancers in his Goldberg.

Hannover’s new staging of Romeo und Julia opens on 6 November 2026. The distinction between the local opening and the history of the choreography is particularly revealing here. Montero’s ballet had its world premiere in Nuremberg in 2009, and the Spanish Compañía Nacional de Danza subsequently danced it in Madrid. Now a different cast takes on the score by Prokofiev. In the opening-night billing, Nicolás Alcázar Sánchez and Natalie Wong are Romeo and Juliet, while Kade Cummings dances Mab. Naming Mab alongside the lovers points to a figure an audience coming straight from Shakespeare might otherwise overlook.

The programme announced for February 2027 puts Montero’s work in the same evening as that of Marcos Morau. The company’s place in the wider dance scene is particularly visible around Easter, when its OsterTanzTage bring visiting companies to Hannover. The host ensemble opens the 2027 festival with Morau / Montero. Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo appear as guests in their own right.

There is a smaller stage in this story as well. For Frameworks 1 at Ballhof 2, members of the ensemble develop short pieces with their colleagues. The June 2027 programme gives dancers who usually interpret someone else’s choices responsibility for making those choices themselves. Between the opera house and the Ballhof, a spectator can follow two sides of a repertory company, the resources needed to retell a full-length ballet and the rehearsal-room exchange from which a new choreographer may emerge.