Marianela Nunez and Patricio Reve in Don Quixote Tonight
Royal Ballet principals Marianela Nunez and Patricio Reve return to Novi Sad, dancing the lead roles in Don Quixote tonight as it opens the Serbian National Theatre's 166th season.
Before every performance of Don Quixote, there are nights when Patricio Reve forgets the audience is even in the hall, and nights when he is keenly aware that around 3,000 people are watching him. The nerves, says the Royal Ballet principal from London, disappear the moment the music starts, but until then he knows exactly how many seats are turned his way. Tonight, at the Serbian National Theatre (SNP), he will be counting them again.
The ballet in question is Minkus’s Don Quixote, choreographed by Djula Harangoza of Hungary, with which the SNP Ballet opens its 166th season tonight, September 14. Reve dances Basilio, Marianela Nunez, also a principal of the London company, dances Kitri, and Leonardo Binelo takes on the role of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. The same pairing danced the premiere of Giselle on the same stage in March, and tomorrow, September 15, the production passes to the home cast, with Rajna Removic as Kitri and Taisei Takahashi as Basilio. According to an announcement carried by the Tanjug news agency in late August, the ballet company revived the guest appearance at the duo’s own request, and the SNP had already brought the same title to audiences in Greece at the end of last season.
Reve was born in Havana, began learning ballet at the Fernando Alonso National Ballet School, and became a principal of the National Ballet of Cuba at nineteen. In 2018 he moved to Australia, to Queensland Ballet. He made his Royal Ballet debut in 2025 as Romeo and has been a principal there since the 2026/27 season. As a child, he admits, he and his classmates idolized Carlos Costa, a dancer performing with that same company at the time, one he says he used to dream about as something unreachable.
Reve draws a line between roles that require him to dig deep and ones where it is enough to simply remember who he is. He dances Basilio from a body raised on Cuban dance, not from analysis in the rehearsal studio, he told journalist Teodora Belic of Dnevnik:
With other ballets I would research more, and that is exactly what gave me more confidence in the character. With this ballet, I think I just need to go back to my roots.
He started dancing Don Quixote as a child, in an environment where the ballet is part of basic dance training, so his approach to the role, he says, comes from the body rather than from thinking.
With Nunez, he says, there is no need for words on stage:
It’s completely non verbal, but there is a lot there, especially because Marianela is very sensitive. You feel that there is someone going through the same experience as you.
That kind of wordless understanding, he says, frees him from excess control, the same perfectionism that, in his words, is useful in the rehearsal studio but only brings tension on stage.
He admits that Romeo and Juliet changed him the most, the role in which he felt dance and acting stop being two separate skills:
It’s really challenging to try to combine those two things. It’s really demanding, because it’s a specific style and you really have to study it until it becomes part of you. You can’t fake it, it has to become real.
Don Quixote asks something different of a dancer, more choreographic than dramatic discipline, but Reve says the same demand for honesty applies there too.
The guest performance, according to SNP Ballet director Aja Jung, is part of the theatre’s broader commitment to bringing top dancers from the world’s leading stages to its audience. “Nunez and Reve have become part of our family, and we are delighted to have the chance to see them again,” Jung said in the announcement carried by Tanjug in late August. The production, in two acts with one intermission, is accompanied by the SNP orchestra under conductor Mikica Jevtic, with set design by Olga Djurdjevic and costumes by Mirjana Stojanovic Mauric.
The SNP did not give an exact starting time in its announcement. Tonight will show whether the dancer who says he can forget the audience is there truly manages it, in front of a hall that knows exactly who Kitri and Basilio are.
