‘I came off stage and instantly burst into tears’
Very early on in my career, I was covering a role for another dancer who was injured. The work was Kenneth Macmillan’s Song of the Earth, a mainly abstract ballet that is based on ancient Chinese poems. It’s about how death is always with you and at any minute life can be taken away. It’s a very spiritual work with two singers on stage and, despite being a one-act ballet, it’s so emotionally provoking and powerful with all these layers to it. I remember coming off stage and instantly bursting into tears, because I was so overcome by this work. I said to my coach, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong!’ And she replied: ‘You’ve got to exactly the right point, this is what you are meant to feel.’
As a young artist, to experience that deep inside your heart was transformative and I later chose it as my final performance when retiring from the Royal Ballet. But nowadays I am much more interested in seeing the effect dance has on other people, particularly children and non-professionals. Dance is how we find ourselves; it builds our souls and nourishes us. I really believe I’ve seen that in action in so many different groups. It also connects us with others – all the science behind dance says it helps people behave better together. We assume it’s competitive but actually, when you’re moving together as a group and listening to music, it creates an amazing high and is incredibly good for your wellbeing. We forget how important that social communication is, and the emotions and imagination it enables within young people – it really does change these kids.
Darcey Bussell
Dame Darcey Bussell is President of the RAD
‘Dance is how we find ourselves. It builds our souls and nourishes us’
Darcey Bussell
Phillip Attmore rehearsing Top Hat. Photo: Johan Persson
‘It’s your voice telling the story’
When I was barely out of high school, I found myself understudying Ben Vereen in a touring production of Fosse. We were in Paris and, thanks to a mutual connection, he took me into a studio for a private lesson. We worked on the opening segment, starting with Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries and ending with Bye Bye Blackbird. After I finished, I stood there, out of breath, waiting to see what he would say. He leans back and says – in a very Ben Vereen way – ‘Yeah, that was good. That was good. Now, how would you do it?’
And it was a lesson I didn’t feel the weight of until years later when I was doing principal work and started understanding that our job as actors, singers and dancers – as the triple threat – is to know whose work we are doing and to bring honour to that. It’s also about how you are the one performing the work and bringing it to life. It matters that you know who you are, and that it’s your voice that’s telling the story and sharing the work of the person who is no longer in the room.
It was a great baton-passing moment from a great Black male song and dance legend, who I grew up looking up to, that connects so closely to the idea of legacy. If we remember the richness of the legacy we’re representing, we don’t have time to unhelpfully compare ourselves to other dancers, we just become bigger people through honouring the legacy. And that is as much about what is offstage as what happens on-stage.
Phillip Attmore
Phillip Attmore stars in Top Hat at Chichester Festival Theatre from 14 July
‘I realised quite suddenly that being on stage and telling a story was what I wanted to do’
Isabella Gasparini
‘I’ll never forget being a little mouse’
I came to dance because my mother ran a dance school in Brazil and I started learning at age three and a half. Every winter, we would have an end-of-term show and one year we did Cinderella – but based on the Disney cartoon, not the Frederick Ashton ballet! I was Jaq, the little mouse, and I just remember having so much fun and realising, quite suddenly, how being on stage and performing to an audience while telling a story was what I wanted to do. But above all that, what I loved the most about that performance was dancing with my friends and seeing all of them enjoying themselves. It was sharing that experience that really made it so much fun.
As you becoming older and a professional, the perfectionist side of us dancers really comes out but when you’re young, you just want to have fun. It’s that sense of fun and the love you have for dance that you need to carry you through your career. I’ve gone through phases of being frustrated with myself for not achieving certain things, but I’m always my happiest when I’m just in the studio and enjoying the moment. If the choreography can take me beyond the steps and the music can carry me to a different place that’s not inside my own head – that’s what I want to maintain.
I have since, as a professional with the Royal Ballet, danced in the Ashton Cinderella and it brought back such special memories. I’ll never quite forget what it felt like to be that little mouse!
Isabella Gasparini
Isabella Gasparini is a First Soloist at the Royal Ballet and an Ambassador for The Fonteyn in São Paolo
‘Hip hop built me as a man and as an artist’
I was born in the 70s in Senegal and arrived in France in the early 80s. We were living in Paris and my mother said I couldn’t go outside because it was too dangerous, so I stayed in our very small home with only the television as a friend. But it was via the television that, as a kid, I was introduced to this whole new culture called hip hop thanks to a show imported from the USA. Discovering hip hop meant, for me, that I discovered a new way of moving, a new physicality.
There was a segment on the show where it showed you a move that you could practice. At the time, I had no school friends but I saw some kids in the playground trying to do this same move and so I went over and started practicing with them. My natural gift for dance meant this was a great way for me to quickly make friends and socialise in this new community. The spirit of hip hop culture really built me as a man and as an artist. I became an autodidact at learning hip hop dance and started teaching other people in the city how to also dance in this way. It wasn’t until 2002 that I started taking formal contemporary dance lessons at a very prestigious school. I was very different to everyone there, as they all had strong backgrounds in ballet or contemporary and had been taking lessons for years. But my goal was to show my community that it was possible to be both a hip hop dancer and a very good contemporary dancer.
Amala Dianor
Amala Dianor’s Gesualdo Passione is in Dance Umbrella at the Barbican on 16 October
‘You’re always hoping for something to break out from what is already familiar’
Kyle Abraham
‘It made me feel young, free and inspired’
Fairly recently, I saw Woolf Works by Wayne McGregor and it was profoundly moving for so many reasons. During the second half, you saw the most beautiful merging together of choreography, lighting design, costume design and the way it was performed by the dancers – so much of what theatre is meant to be. It was so imaginative and beautiful and thoughtful and considerate and ferocious and whimsical, it was beyond imagination and made me feel like a little kid again. In fact, just thinking about it now makes me feel quite emotional. Watching it made me feel so young and free and inspired in a way that I hadn’t been for so long.
There will always be songs, dances and artworks that people have some kind of connection to that is not understood, yet we often find ourselves being hypercritical of anything and everything. I’m still inspired by various works I encounter, yet I often look at things with a critical eye or listen to music with a critical ear. Within that way of operating, what you’re really looking – and hoping – for is something to break out from what is already known or delivered in a familiar pattern or package. It feels like a relief when those moments happen. Often, for me, those breakthrough moments happen when I’m watching dancing that is truly virtuosic, and sometimes that’s because of its subtlety and sometimes it’s because of the more extreme possibilities of movements. But, most of all, it’s the musicality of a dancer that really blows me away.
Kyle Abraham
A.I.M. by Kyle Abraham celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026
Rosemary Waugh is an art critic and journalist for titles including the New Statesman, Time Out and the TLS. Her first book, Running the Room: Interviews with Women Theatre Directors was published in 2023.
