Tara-Brigitte Bhavnani

Canadian dancer Tara-Brigitte Bhavnani is a First Artist of The Royal Ballet. She joined the Company in 2002 and was promoted to First Artist in 2007. Bhavnani studied at Canada’s National Ballet School aged 10–18 and was awarded the Peter Dwyer scholarship for excellence in dance and the 2001 Erik Bruhn Memorial Award. She represented her country at the first International Congress of Classical Contemporary Ballet in Mexico (2000), and upon graduating in 2001 she spent six months at the Paris Opera Ballet School before joining The Royal Ballet.

Bhavnani’s repertory with the Company includes Empress Elisabeth (Mayerling), Countess and Fairy of the Crystal Fountain (The Sleeping Beauty), Beautiful Tsarevna (The Firebird), Bathilde (Giselle), Rosaline (Romeo and Juliet), Fairy Spring and Fairy Godmother (Cinderella), Pavlova’s Dragonfly solo, Arabian Dance (The Nutcracker), Nymph (Daphnis and Chloë), Spanish Dance and Acts II and IV solo Swan (Swan Lake), ‘Phlegmatic’ (Four Temperaments), Principal White Couple (Les Patineurs), lead d’Jampée and pas d’action (La Bayadère), Anna Vyrubova (Anastasia), Lead courtesan (Manon), Katia (A Month in the Country) and the Principal Couple (La Valse). She created roles in ‘Trespass’ and ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (Titian: Metamorphosis 2012), Sensorium, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Tsarina’s Slippers (The Royal Opera).

Bhavnani is a trained ballet teacher, fully qualified with the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing and graduated with honours from the Royal Ballet School’s Professional Dancers Teachers’ Course (AISTD, RBS DipPDTC). In 2017, she created and presented Royal Ballet Fit, a series of online exercise videos designed to learn the basics of ballet as well as improve fitness through dance.

Bhavnani engages in a lot of charitable work, and takes part in annual Swimathons supporting various causes. In 2018, she taught a ballet programme at the Royal Opera House for Arts 4 Dementia, helping those affected and their carers gain empowerment through artistic stimulation and creative dance.

Having become a mother at the end of 2017, Bhavnani returned to the Royal Opera House stage in the Spring of 2019.