hen the announcement telling you to switch off your phone is drowned out by whooping and cheering, you know audiences are glad to be back in the theatre. English National Ballet wastes no time getting on stage, converting five films made in lockdown into live dance. The works are familiar from their digital form, but live you notice different qualities and details. Yuri Possokhov’s Senseless Kindness loses its atmospheric cinematography but gains from the the ability to follow his long, lyrical phrases in full, performed with great sensitivity by a quartet of dancers (Isaac Hernández, Alison McWhinney, Francesco Gabriele Frola, Emma Hawes) attuned to each other in perfect unity. Russell Maliphant’s Echoes is perhaps least changed in effect as the lights and music are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting, whereas Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Laid in Earth is shorn of cinematic props, goth decor and earth-covered floor. The film set used reflections to suggest two worlds of the living and dead; here that’s stripped away, leaving only the dancers. But what you see is how they convincingly embody Cherkaoui’s more contemporary language, whether that’s the coiling and prowling of Precious Adams or Jeffrey Cirio’s rubber-band body. In Take Five Blues, you can see Stina Quagebeur’s clever handling of her company of eight, getting inside the texture of the music – Nigel Kennedy’s version of Take Five – from filling the stage with rippling formations to matching a crazy violin solo with a dancer’s legs scribbling wildly in the air. The second half, to jazzed-up Bach, turns into a freestyle session, dancers taking turns in the centre, showing off with delight. It’s crowdpleasing but not cliched, perhaps inspired by William Forsythe’s recent dances to contemporary music that pop with the pleasure of ballet’s speed and skill. There’s more pleasure in Jolly Folly, Arielle Smith’s ode to silent movies. It’s a dance of comical exaggerations, pirouettes and pratfalls at increasing speed. You miss the backdrops of the film version but appreciate the gusto of the dancers going all out, with palpable energy, the one thing that you can never really get through a screen.