Chilling out

The Royal Ballet’s Les Patineurs is January as you would wish it. No slush, no new-year sales, no streaming chest colds. Winter, as imagined by Frederick Ashton, is an eternal ice rink lit by Chinese lanterns hung from icing-sugar branches. Ashton’s choreography is ingenious. His dancers really do seem to glide, the boards of the stage to freeze. You believe completely that they are on skates, not slippers. The men wear sheepskin jackets, the women bonnets and polka-dot tulle. Sleigh bells ring and fresh flakes fall. The ensemble slip, slide and dance a skating conga. Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell are a Torvill-and-Dean dream in the pas de deux. Kaneko is light, flowing, sweetly flustered as her partner tips her upside-down. Yuhui Choe and Anna Rose O’Sullivan are marvels of precision and balance. Choe’s thousand-and-one spins are done with consummate control.

Marcelino Sambé, powerfully charismatic in The Nutcracker, is here the snowiest of show-off skaters.