BIRMINGHAM Royal Ballet is in two places at once at present. By splitting in two, the company is appearing this week in Poole and Truro – and York, where the tour alights tonight and tomorrow at the Theatre Royal.

This split-tour initiative enables the company to present full-scale works, with orchestral accompaniment, in mid-scale venues.

The programmes have been chosen to demonstrate the versatility of BRB, and so the York audiences will see a new piece by New York choreographer Jessica Lang, Lyric Pieces, set to romantic piano miniatures by Edvard Grieg; a Gilbert and Sullivan medley set to the comic choreography of great Brit John Cranko in Pineapple Poll; and excerpts from classic ballets under the title of Bite-sized Ballet.

The Bethena Concert Waltz from Kenneth MacMillan’s comic ragtime ballet, Elite Syncopations, and the virtuoso pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s Don Quixote will complement The Clog Dance and Lily Of Laguna pas de deux from company director David Bintley’s warming peek into the lives of two unlikely lovers in Hobson’s Choice.

“It’s complicated putting it together because you’re looking for a balanced programme with pieces that work at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, and you’re also restricted because you only have half the orchestra with the other half doing the other tour,” says director David Bintley.

“One year we had to make some changes in the programme because some of the audiences were not as sophisticated as they are in York. They weren’t as comfortable with the experimental pieces.

“Now it’s about finding a balanced programme of the well-known and the challenging, but you also have to think about the company that will be performing the pieces; who is dancing where.”

David’s choreographic contribution is two pieces from his ballet of Harold Brighouse’s play Hobson’s Choice.

“I saw the David Lean film version when I was very young and saw it again many years later and that’s when I realised it was a sort of Cinderella storyline with switched genders that could be told in dance,” he says. “It’s one thing to set a story in a palace, but how do you turn a story into a ballet set in a shoe shop? That was the challenge!”

He is delighted that BRB will be the first European company to present Jessica Lang’s work. “Jessica was originally a contemporary dancer and choreographer but has been doing a lot of crossover pieces in America that I’d seen on DVD,” he says. “I keep my ear to the ground and knew some of the companies she’d worked with, so it’s great to introduce her to Britain.”

• Birmingham Royal Ballet, York Theatre Royal, tonight at 7.30pm; tomorrow at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk