MAKE the most of it. Next week, Birmingham Royal Ballet will dance at York Theatre Royal for the first time, in only three performances, one on Tuesday, two on Wednesday.

This is too few, as the high demand for tickets affirms, but it is definitely better than nothing.

"All the British dance companies had a meeting with the Arts Council 18 months ago, where we said we wanted to extend the number of theatres we went to and the number of performances," says BRB director David Bintley, explaining how the York visit was set in motion.

"This is something the Arts Council was keen to endorse, and so we looked at ways of expanding our north eastern programmes, where Sunderland has been our main base of operation.

"When the company was the Sadler's Wells Royal Ballet it used to come to York Theatre Royal in the 1970s, and so our executive director got in touch with Ludo Theatre Royal chief executive Ludo Keston and next week's performances are the consequence."

Accompanied by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, Birmingham Royal Ballet will perform Bintley's technically challenging Allegri Diversi to music by Rossini; Dante by Sir Frederick Ashton, depicting the battle between good and evil, to the music of Liszt; and Kenneth MacMillan's Elite Syncopations, an embodiment of the excitement of the jazz age, choreographed to ragtime pieces by Scott Joplin and his contemporaries.

"My piece, Allegri Diversi, is a classical piece from 1987 which has not been done for a while. It has beautiful music and is just a beautiful dance to open the show.

"Often, starting pieces are abstract and have no narrative, and I've brought it back not only because I think it's quite good but also because I made it for small-scale theatres, originally for six of the best dancers in the company, when we were at Sadler's Wells, and now for eight."

Ashton's 1940 work Dante Sonata has lain dormant since the early 1950s. "We are part of the Royal Ballet Company, and this piece is part of our heritage, so I have rescued a work people thought had been lost," Bintley says. "I called upon some of the older dancers who remembered it from that time and I just did a little bit of filling where it needed it.

"It's based on Dante's idea of cosmic forces of good and evil and reflected the wartime in which it was written, and we opened our revival just a day after the Twin Towers attacks so it had a very powerful impact."

MacMillan's Elite Syncopations dates from the 1970s. "Ragtime music had just come back into favour because of the film The Sting," says Bintley. "It's set in a honky-tonk hall and it's just a very colourful piece that's a great way to finish the show with a ragtime band on stage."

Birmingham Royal Ballet, York Theatre Royal, April 20 and 21. Tickets update: extremely limited availability for 7.30pm performances; some seats available for 2pm Wednesday matinee.

Updated: 09:00 Friday, April 16, 2004