Marguerite Porter gathered stars and stars in the making on Sunday to raise funds for the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars she holds each summer in York.

As in her first gala in 2005, she called upon her friends and her eye for talent for two hours of ballet dancing, show songs and turns, from Anton du Beke to Anita Harris and Alexander Hanson, in a sold-out event of precise choreography, informality and the unexpected.

After the young seminar students set the mood with the joyful, swaying Everybody Move It, and the graceful Demelza Parish and Xander Parish premiered Christopher Hampson's Echoes, dapper compere Nicky Henson introduced a tribute to Royal Ballet founder Dame Ninette de Valois, alias Madam.

Samara Downs was as delicate as silk in Betrayed Girl and Sir Derek Jacobi, no less, elicited the humour and humanity in Dame Ninette's poems (her second love), especially in I Love Pubs. Film footage of a venerable Dame Ninette directing Marguerite Porter in The Dying Swan made way for Buenos Aires ballerina Marianela Nunez dancing those very steps as exquisitely as Madam could have wished.

Wayne Sleep had fun with Chaplin; actress Samantha Bond had slightly nervous fun tangoing with her favourite dancer, Sir Anthony Dowell; Hamburg Ballet's Heather Jurgensen and Yaroslav Ivanenko's relationship drama Ne M'Oublie Pas had you wishing you could see more of their breathtaking partnershipand less of Lauren Cuthbertson and Martin Harvey's classical but old-fashioned, feathery pas de deux from Petipa's Le Corsaire.