Natalie Carter, who took up ballet aged nine, beat thousands of hopefuls to secure her place at the Moscow school.

The Watford teenager is only the fourth British dancer to be given a place in the academy's 230-year history.

The new series has already been plunged into an age row following the axing of choreographer Arlene Phillips, 66, as a judge, after six series.

Former principal dancer of the Royal Ballet Darcey Bussell, 40, and 30-year-old singer Alesha Dixon, who won the competition in 2007, are coming on board, while Phillips will be The One Show's Strictly expert.

“Falling Angels is part of Kylián’s black and white series,” says Welch. “I’ve wanted to do it for a long time. Falling Angels is part of his newer style that the company hasn’t really explored yet.” Falling Angels is a work for eight women which combines classical lines with percussive movements and stark lighting and costumes. It will appear on Without Boundaries, the fall mixed repertory program, September 24 through October 4 along with the Houston premiere of Twyla Tharp’s energetic In The Upper Room and a world premiere by Welch. The new work, Elements, will be “a ballet about the four elements, with a mother earth figure and her four sons,” Welch says of the piece he is setting to music by Paul Hindemith.

The second mixed repertory program in March, American at Heart, showcases Robbins’s American classic Fancy Free alongside Balanchine’s 1928 forerunner to his neoclassic works, Apollo and Christopher Bruce’s 2006 Hush, a light-hearted romp to feel-good music by Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin.

Dove, who died of AIDS in 1996 at the age of 49, had an eclectic career. He danced in the companies of three choreographers with distinctly differing aesthetics: Anna Sokolow (briefly), Merce Cunningham, and Alvin Ailey (in 1979, Ailey commissioned the first piece he created). An itinerant dancemaker, Dove tailored pieces for groups as diverse as Dayton Contemporary Dance Theater, Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal, the Basel Ballet, and American Ballet Theatre.. The three pieces that PNB brought to the East Coast were choreographed for three different companies. Dove created Vespers in 1986 for DCDT, Dancing on the Front Porch. of Heaven in 1993 for the Royal Swedish Ballet, and Red Angels in 1994 for NYCB. Not only do they show the versatility of the PNB ensemble; they reveal how sensitive Dove was to whatever dancers and company aesthetic he had to deal with.

Just as Diaghilev's effect on European audiences of 1911 was climaxed by Fokine's Polovtsian Dances, so Concord opens into the distant world of golden age Spain. Nacho Duato's Por Vos Muero (For Thee I Die): on a darkened stage, the living pass from us, like great birds seeking perpetual night. Yet in their swirling figures, we glimpse cycles of loss and joy, endless intertwinings of fresh growth and obliteration. Richly danced throughout, it is choreography to watch time and again.

Alexei Ratmansky's Scuola di Ballo is the perfect chaser. In the Massine/Lichine tradition of frolics, it has enough charm to choke a grizzly bear. The setting is delightful, the dancing a cascade of turns and jumps, several per semiquaver, making even speedy Boccherini puff to keep up. But the triumph belongs to the principals: Jane Casson, the desperate would-be ballerina; Lana Jones, the model student; Ben Davis, the irrepressible dancing-master.