English National Ballet may be a touring company but it’s always looking for ways to increase its profile in London. There’s the big Christmas season at the Coliseum, of course, and spectaculars at the Albert Hall in the summer. But returning to the Festival Hall for the first time in 11 years this week is giving ENB the chance to show London what it can do away from the full-length repertoire.

Short ballets are like a shot in the arm to the dancers, and how they love the more intimate focus and greater variety that such works present. You can see their delight right from the beginning of this programme, in David Dawson’s A Million Kisses to my Skin. It looks wonderful on these dancers – and indeed, on the Festival Hall’s new dance stage.

Dawson’s sleek choreography, set to the felicitous rhythms of a Bach piano concerto, manages to flatter the nine white-clad dancers while also spurring them on to greater technical achievements. The language is highly classical and formal, but undercut by a larky sense of anarchy and infused with pleasure. It revels in frisky lifts and sexy high extensions but its supple elegance is never predictable. At one point it throws a spotlight on the exemplary pairing of Agnes Oaks and Thomas Edur. Their central duet, with him repeatedly pulling her back into his arms, is filled with tender, palpable connections. But, really, everyone here is fantastic.

As they are in the impressive world premiere from Wayne Eagling, the company’s director. It’s called Resolution and is set to Mahler (the five Rückert songs). Eagling says that in making this ballet he was inspired by the courage and spirit of young boys he met who were suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and the horrifying degenerative muscle weakness that entails.

There is much transcendent melancholy in Mahler’s music which Eagling’s choreography rides, and a sense of hope despite the despair. The dance is weighted with feeling, especially for the men, and the language, stretched in the modern manner, is imbued with a contemplative beauty. The choreography emerges like quick emotional snapshots, but eventually is remembered for its final male trio, in which two dancers share the burden of a third, who seems gripped by an inevitable paralysis. Resolution clearly comes from the heart and the nine dancers give it their all.

ENB has been dancing Études since 1955, but the company certainly doesn’t look tired of it. Harald Lander’s ballet, set to an orchestration of Czerny’s piano exercises (played with great zip by ENB’s orchestra conducted by Gavin Sutherland), is an exhilarating tribute to the classroom exercises that form the foundation of a dancer’s life. Its rumbustious exuberance and whip-cracking allegro bring out the best in everyone. But special kudos to principal ballerina Elena Glurdjidze and to Zdenek Konvalina, a guest artist from the National Ballet of Canada, whose buoyant performance gave 110 per cent and then some.

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