Leaping to new heights at the Royal Opera

By DAVID LISTER

LONDON - Few people, even diehard dance fans, know the face or the name of the man about to take over as director of the Royal Ballet. (He is an Australian called Ross Stretton). But every dance fan, and quite a few people who have never strutted their stuff or watched a performance of The Sleeping Beauty, know the face and the name of the woman appointed this week to run the Royal Opera House's two new studio theatres - the intimate spaces aimed at bringing in new audiences for dance and opera.

Deborah Bull, through her Travels With My Tutu on prime time television, has helped to bring dance to a mass audience. As a dancer with the Royal Ballet she has been a fixture at Covent Garden for the best part of two decades. Plucked by New Labour three years ago to be a member of the Arts Council, she has brought an artist's perspective to the deliberations over public funding of arts administration. At the same time she has written two well-received tomes on dance and is a regular newspaper columnist.

Miss Bull does not exactly fit the image of the ethereal, chain-smoking, bundle of raw emotion that can be a prima ballerina. Among the ranks of the Royal Ballet stars she may not be quite as sultrily sensual as Viviana Durante, nor does she provoke the schoolgirl crushes showered on the English rose persona of Darcey Bussell. On the contrary she stresses her normality, even telling interviewers of her sleeping problems and her "obligatory midnight pee". She has tellingly described herself as a Salieri, not a Mozart. "What God didn't give me, I put there by hard work."

But Deborah Bull has her own style: intelligent, thoughtful, focused and ambitious, and by no means unaware of the attractiveness of her slight frame, easy, cheery manner and constant gesticulation.

This is not a woman who scares easily. Yet just before last Christmas, waiting in the wings to take the Covent Garden stage for Swan Lake, scared is precisely what she got. "I've never suffered from nerves before performing in my life," she told me this week, "and suddenly I felt nervous. And I didn't want to remember my dancing years as time when I was nervous on stage."

Almost there and then she decided to call it a day. Her last dance with the Royal Ballet didn't occur until this month when she bowed out in the gala to celebrate the retirement of the Royal Ballet director Sir Anthony Dowell. Not that anyone knew she was bowing out. Bull had not even told her fellow dancers, let alone her fans, that this was her last appearance with the company she had served for 20 years.

So she is quitting at the height of her popularity and esteem. And in a very different way her next role promises to be just as exciting. Charged with bringing in new audiences to dance and opera, and exciting small and middle-scale companies to the studio spaces, Bull is already working on radical ideas for the Linbury and Clore theatres in the redeveloped Covent Garden building. Opera is not her metier so she will take time and consult before laying down her plans there; but in dance she has ideas for "virtual dancers", computer generated images on gauze to accompany the old tech human beings. She also wants improvised pieces in which dancers will react with the audience; and a collaboration between a choreographer and Tracey Emin.

But then Deborah Bull has never shirked a challenge. The youngest daughter of a vicar, she followed her three older sisters into Skegness junior school. "I wasn't aware of having any special talent," she has said. "My sister Melanie actually got better grades in some ballet exams." But her teacher did think she was something special and recommended her, at the age of 11, to audition for the Royal Ballet school. The school in Richmond Park must have struck the young Deborah Bull as another world in almost the same way that it struck Billy Elliot in the film.

Bull has recalled: "It threw me into another world at a very impressionable age. There were a lot of sophisticated southerners and I used to come home and say, 'Mummy, why haven't I got a horse?' I wince now because my parents sacrificed a lot to send me there and my sisters were never resentful. Of course I didn't have a bloody horse! My dad was a vicar with four children."

She drew particular inspiration from one teacher, Patricia Linton, to whom her book Dancing Away is dedicated. Linton, who taught Bull at the age of 13, recalled her in an interview as someone who combined talent with exceptionally hard work. "She set about things in a very honest and determined way. She was single-minded, but she was never narrow-minded. In fact, what was most unusual about Debbie was that she was always interested in everything theatrical and intellectual; she had a tremendous respect for culture, which in somebody so young was extraordinary."

Her career was nearly a short one, as she almost failed her first year because of what her ballet teachers described as "her short Achilles' tendons". When asked about that in the past she has shown her irritation: "What crap! There's never been anything wrong with them. They just wanted to prepare themselves an easy get-out clause."

At the senior school at Baron's Court she went on to win the prestigious Prix de Lausanne, which had the bonus of paying for a further year's study, during which she squeezed a French A-level into a single term. She was then picked to go on tour to the United States with the Royal Ballet and in 1981 was invited to join the company as a full member on her return.

Ten years later she became a principal dancer with the company. She was always bright enough to know her great strengths and her limitations. "I guess I'm a bold dancer, a strong dancer. People say they like my honesty and lack of artifice. I'm not lyrical, delicate, wafting." For those reasons, perhaps, she never danced Juliet or Giselle. But her range has been large, from classical ballet to starring in the contemporary choreography of William Forsythe.

In her twenties Bull married Charles Biss, an architect, but they separated a few years later. Asked by a journalist whether her dedication to ballet drove them apart, she said: "It's a hard question to answer because I don't know how much of what's happened in my private life is because of me and how much is because of the career. There are plenty of people in the company who are happily married and have normal lives. Maybe I could just never do that anyway. I'm a bit of a pain really, because I'm very independent. So's Torje, which is quite good."

Torje is her Norwegian boyfriend Torje Eike, with whom she lives in London and who, like Bull, is often away on tour, but not as a performer - Eike is physiotherapist to Mick Jagger.

They have no children. Bull has said: "I've never really had the urge. I do find it an incey-wincy bit galling that there's some unspoken suggestion in society that you're a bit of a monster if you don't want to have children. People say, 'Oh, you'll come round to it - it's different when they're your own.' But perhaps I'm just not cut out to do it - which is fine. The world's overpopulated anyway."

But Bull was to show that she did have plans for fulfilment outside dance.

In the last few years she began to develop a parallel career to her dancing. She became that rare animal, a spokeswoman for dance. She rapidly developed a public profile.

Part of Bull's determination to be heard was born out of frustration that dance was undervalued compared to opera and theatre, which put up a never-ending supply of high profile and passionately articulate administrators, directors and intendants. Dance had nobody. She said: "While there are plenty of cultural polymaths who hail from the world of music and opera, there has been a marked dearth of this sort of figure in balletic circles since Diaghilev shuffled off his mortal overcoat.

"For too long dancers, like well-behaved children, have bowed to the pressure to be 'seen and not heard'. On the few occasions we are asked to speak, it's all too often about the trivia of toe shoes and tutus. Dancers hold a wealth of knowledge within their bodies, literally a 'body of knowledge' which is accessed all too infrequently. We have unparalleled self-discipline, a terrifying level of dedication and true insight into the work we do and the courage it takes to do it - all qualities which would be supremely useful on the other side of the 'them and us' divide."

In public, she first articulated her passion for the arts at the Oxford Union in 1996, opposing the motion "This House Believes the National Lottery Gives Too Much Money to the Elitist Arts". Lord Gowrie, her debating partner, described it as "the best speech I have heard on the arts in 30 years". His admiration was not totally an intellectual one, but he recognised a coming star in arts politics. The motion was heavily defeated and the event marked a turning point in her life.

She told an interviewer: "It's extraordinary: my family tree of what I do now can all be traced back to this one parent, which was the Oxford Union. Interviews followed and then a television production company rang me up."

She joined the board of the South Bank Centre in London and three years ago she received a call on her mobile from Chris Smith, asking her to become a member of the Arts Council. She was never going to be Smith's lapdog. Bull has been critical of New Labour; she has been disappointed that culture never received an airing in the election campaign, and in her book Dancing Away she expressed her fears that Tony Blair's fixation with "the people's judgement" could kill traditional ballet. "Clear the stages of Giselle and Swan Lake, and make way for a new production starring Anthea Turner and a lot of coloured balls," she wrote.

She has quickly made her presence felt on the Arts Council. She has argued for more funding for dance within the Council; and she has helped a fellow dance lover, the former head of the Royal Opera House Michael Kaiser, to elevate ballet's profile against opera at the Royal Opera House, its name not the least factor in allowing the public to forget it also houses one of the best ballet companies in the world.

One friend and associate says: "It has been fascinating to watch. Deborah is a very interesting case of someone who knew there was only a certain time left in her chosen career and set about deliberately reinventing herself. She's very good at self-publicity. She can write on anything, you know the 'My fridge, my dog' pieces, she's telegenic and she's bright."

Now, Michael Kaiser's successor Tony Hall has asked her to run two Royal Opera House spaces and bring in new audiences. Deborah Bull will need her much practised skills of advocacy on behalf of her art form. She, and to be fair the Royal Ballet as a whole, have remained untarnished by the years of crisis and incompetent management at the Royal Opera House. Being the catalyst for changing it in the public perception from an elitist and overpriced institution to an innovative and adventurous venue for young people will make dancing Swan Lake in your late thirties feel like child's play.

- INDEPENDENT