1999 – The BalletBoyz established

British-born dancers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt first met at The Royal Ballet School and built an important friendship during their respective careers as principal dancers with The Royal Ballet, dancing works by major choreographers as well as the established classics. The name BalletBoyz first appeared when the duo made a documentary television series about their lives as ballet dancers for Channel 4. Nunn and Trevitt left The Royal Ballet in 1999 to pursue other opportunities and broaden the range of dance styles they performed, first becoming founding members of Tetsuya Kumakawa’s K-Ballet in Japan, and then returning to London to establish their own company, BalletBoyz.

The pair commissioned and performed in works by some of the most sought-after choreographers of the day, including William Forysthe, Akram Khan, Christopher Wheeldon, Russell Maliphant and Michael Clark. In conjunction with performing, Nunn and Trevitt continued to produce documentaries on subjects as diverse as Darcey Bussell’s retirement performances, The Royal Ballet in Cuba, Christopher Wheeldon becoming the first British choreographer to produce a work for the Bolshoi Ballet, and engineering a digital corps de ballet for Wheeldon’s Electric Counterpoint at The Royal Ballet in 2015.

Nunn and Trevitt retired from performing in 2009 and reinvented their company to feature young men from a variety of backgrounds as part of their project entitled theTALENT. The company expanded to ten dancers and tours Britain and abroad. A significant recent commission for the company began in 2014 with a collaboration between BalletBoyz, Keaton Henson and choreographer Iván Pérez to create a feature-length film, Young Men, which examined the theme of war, which was broadcast on BBC2 on Armistice Day in 2017.