MAKE that A Summer Gala Evening of Dance and Song and Turns.

Here was a chocolate box of dancing delights and more besides, in aid of the Yorkshire Ballet Seminars held each summer at York St John College.

Director Marguerite Porter called up a galaxy of friends for the seminars' first visit to the Grand Opera House, opening up with the radiant Anita Harris defying microphone gremlins in Let's Face The Music And Dance.

The seminars' first-week students induced Bravos aplenty with Wayne Eagling's zestful Troppo Allegro; Simon Callow and show director Wayne Sleep did a lovely luvvie Well Did You Evah in Max Wall's cast-off boots and leggings; master of ceremonies Jason Connery dipped in and out.

Strutting Bonnie Langford took her chair for a seductive walk in Hit Me With A Hot Note (we were all being hit with a hot night in the sold-out auditorium); Royal Ballet-bound Xander Parish, from North Ferriby, was all linear grace in Christopher Hampson's La Vision; and Mara Galeazzi and David Makhateli's passionate, temperature-raising Bedroom pas de deux from MacMillan's Manon made interval drinks all the more vital.

Langford and Anton du Beke teased and tingled; Chiaki Nagao took the female dance prize of the night, so butterfly-delicate in the hands of David Kierce in David Nixon's Madame Butterfly; Yat-Sen Chang dazzled with daring leaps at high speed, accompanying Simone Clark in Diana and Acteon. More of the same next summer, please.

Updated: 11:06 Tuesday, August 02, 2005