It’s not grandiosity or hubris that prompts ballet companies to name themselves after their home cities or states or nations or kingdoms. It’s just the bald-faced fact that there aren’t enough funds, private, royal, or public, to support a whole panoply of such troupes. Ballet is a money-sucking beast. Hence, when a new or—in the case of the London City Ballet—resurrected ensemble emerges, all we can do is cheer, and rush to buy tickets before the hopeful enterprise evanesces, as so many have done before. Last seen in 1996, after which it folded from rickety finances, the current, 12-person London City Ballet has been warming up in Portugal, China, and all over the U.K. before it hits London and New York this month. The repertory leans toward the plotless: premieres by such millennials as Arielle Smith (her queer Carmen proved a recent hit for the San Francisco Ballet) and revivals of works by the late Liam Scarlett and Kenneth MacMillan. —Apollinaire Scherr