The country's favourite ballerina is quitting at the height of her powers. But, with the search for a successor on, is the future bright for British dance, asks Martin Kettle
Just in front of me in a Covent Garden rehearsal studio, Darcey Bussell is sitting on the floor removing one of her ballet shoes. It is impossible not to be transfixed by this unexpected and intimate glimpse of the business end of her graceful art. Her toes are wrapped in white protective bandages. She frowns as she rubs the inside of her foot. Dance is a performance art that partly depends on the concealment of effort. A dancer's feet are the engine under the bonnet. Bussell inflicts a lot of pain on herself to give the public its pleasure.
To watch Bussell rehearsing for her farewell Royal Ballet performances this week is an ambivalent experience. Britain's favourite ballerina - and British ballet's first household name since Margot Fonteyn quit the stage nearly 40 years ago - is currently dancing superbly, yet she hangs up her ballet shoes for the last time on Friday night. BBC2 will broadcast the bittersweet event live to the nation along with a tribute documentary. Unflinchingly, Bussell will exit from Covent Garden not in one of her many crowd-pleasing princess roles, but after a performance of Kenneth MacMillan's Song of the Earth, based on Mahler's Der Abschied (the farewell). It is sad music for a sad occasion. The end of any artist's career is even a kind of death.
But at least Bussell is doing what the prime minister has found it more difficult to do. She is going out at the top, not waiting to leave until she loses the thing that took her there. By doing so, she is doing exactly what one of Tony Blair's underlings vainly hoped he could achieve, quitting while the public begs for more. Her performances for the Royal Ballet this season in Christopher Wheeldon's DGV and George Balanchine's Apollo have been gloriously assured. In her pre-retirement galas at Sadler's Wells last month - for which all the tickets sold out in a day - she was at the height of her powers in a range of demanding roles. No dancer of our times has connected more naturally both with the dance audience and with the wider public.
Watching Bussell up close in the rehearsal studio offers instant confirmation that the qualities that have made her special are still in full working order. The trademarks are all there - the line of her long legs, the amazing fluidity of her movement, the supple shape of her hand gestures, the distinctive way she holds her head, and the general impression, though she is 38 and a mother of two, of youthful purity. And as home-counties colonels and pubescent Darcey-wannabes all agree, she is also very, very pretty.
With a torn green T-shirt Bussell wears a black one-piece body-stocking that allows her to continually scrutinise her line in the mirrors that surround the studio. Like all dancers in rehearsal, she counts the beats of the music out loud all the time. Sometimes you can even catch another sound you never hear from her in the theatre - the heavy breathing caused by such serious exertion. "You pulled me too hard. That really hurt," she complains to her partner Gary Avis when a gravity-defying lift doesn't go quite to plan. On one occasion, she even stumbles on to her knees. The world of illusion that she carries about herself dissolves briefly as Bussell lies on the floor to get her composure back. And when the rehearsal ends, she immediately wraps her lower back in a therapeutic corset and heads off for a recuperative massage, suddenly vulnerable.
Strictly speaking, Friday's farewell will not be Bussell's final curtain call. In the weeks before Chistmas, she will emerge in a new - and to ballet purists, artistically questionable - guise to tour the country in a series of shows with crossover singer Katherine Jenkins entitled Viva la Diva. In these unashamedly populist performances, there will be little or no ballet. Instead, Bussell will tap-dance in public for the first time and even, it is rumoured by the Daily Telegraph, perform a U- certificate striptease. There is talk, too, of a show pairing her with Strictly Come Dancing star Anton du Beck (the ballroom dancer who partnered Lesley Garrett in the TV show's breakthrough first series and who has more recently taught Cherie Blair to dance). "Darcey will have to learn how to dance backwards," a source says. "She won't have done that before." Clearly, there is something bottled up in her that she wishes to release.
Ballet fans chatter optimistically about the inevitability of a Covent Garden comeback. After 28 years immersed in the ballet world, she will be unable to resist the call, the faithful believe. But that's not what she says herself, and no one I have spoken to at the Royal Ballet expects her to change her mind. For them, Friday really is Bussell's last dance on the ballet stage. That's because, early in the new year, she will be gone from us altogether. Bussell is selling up and emigrating to Australia with her husband Angus and their daughters.
Bussell's departure will leave a few broken hearts among the fans and a big hole at the summit of British ballet and British dance. The hole will be filled in time - because that is what always happens eventually. Just as there was dance after Fonteyn, a much more dominant ballerina in her era, so there will be dance after Darcey.
Nevertheless, Bussell's retirement comes at a moment of change and uncertainty in ballet and the wider dance world. While the immediate focus is on celebrating a great talent and a brilliant career, this week's events inevitably prompt larger questions about the position of dance in this country today. When the 20-year-old Bussell was fast-tracked to Royal Ballet stardom as MacMillan's new muse in Prince of the Pagodas in 1989, she was the latest in a what seemed a reliable production line of homegrown company principal dancers. Now, 18 years on, British ballet has become as internationalised as British football. The Royal Ballet is again enjoying a rich vein of success these days, but there have never been fewer British principals in the 90-strong company than there are right now. So where is the next generation's Darcey Bussell going to come from?
The future looks more secure today than it did two years ago, with the long-overdue £20m refurbishment of the Royal Ballet School underway. This is the country's elite dance academy at which Bussell herself was given such a hard time as a late-blossoming pupil in the early 1980s. The works, which include extending the RBS's dance and recuperative facilities at White Lodge in Richmond Park, have been half paid for by the government and the other half raised privately. State-funded scholarships to the school - helping the next generation of Billy Elliots - have also been extended by the Department for Education.
But the debate is only partly about ballet and only partly about the elite end of dance training. The bigger question is also about Britain's dance infrastructure and dance culture. The challenge that is highlighted as Bussell departs is how dance in general can be strengthened and secured, so that the instinctive human love of dance and movement can be mobilised to allow not just future Darceys but future generations of more ordinary mortals the chance to find their dancing feet.
Dance and dancing are among the most popular of all the arts. Many more viewers are likely to tune in to Bussell's Covent Garden farewell on Friday than will normally tune to any televised opera or televised classical concert. Yet even that total will fall far short of the 10 million who watch Strictly Come Dancing. Nearly 5 million people take part in dance activities each year. Around 10 million people go to watch dance events. A further million attend fitness-related dance classes. By the standards of the other performing arts, these are formidable, envy-inducing numbers.
Yet dance remains in almost every respect the poor relation of the performing arts in Britain. Make the comparison with subsidised theatre, or with subsidised opera, and the Cinderella cliche is obvious and appropriate. In spite of dance's popularity, it rarely commands the media attention that is regularly - and rightly, for this is not a zero-sum game - lavished on the other performing arts. Bussell's farewell is an occasion to savour, but its prominence is a rare exception to the systemic marginalisation of dance in our creative culture. Most of the rest of the time, dance languishes down there with puppet theatre in the arts hierarchy when it should be up there at the top alongside drama, music and the museums.
This is therefore a very significant moment of opportunity for dance's normally silent voice to be heard and listened to. But the mood in large parts of the dance world is beleaguered. A sense of impending doom about the next public spending round, mixed with indignation about the decision to raid the Lottery to bail out the Olympics, has combined to make dance companies fear that the relatively good times of the last decade are about to end, just when the public appetite for dance is so buoyant. Matthew Bourne - creator of the all-male Swan Lake and now of the imminent and eagerly awaited Car Man and, apart from Bussell, probably the most widely known name in British dance today - says: "We're living in a time when the general public, from all different cultural backgrounds, are very much into dance. But the younger talents, the smaller companies are right on the edge. I fear for the future, even for my own company."
The immediate issue in British dance, as for the arts in general, is whether Gordon Brown as prime minister will renounce the plans laid by Gordon Brown as chancellor for real-terms cuts in the next three years' arts budgets and instead sanction the continuation of real-terms funding from the public purse. Given the number of jobs (and thus votes) in the creative economy, not just in dance, this ought to be a political no-brainer for a new prime minister seeking to rebuild his party's support. The creative economy is right up there with financial services as an employer in electorally pivotal south-east England. But politicians rarely get it about the arts, and the recent Olympics lottery raid has had a very demoralising effect in the sector.
The longer term issue, though no less urgent, is to get the dance infrastructure right. By comparison with music, where so much good work has been done in recent years, dance is under-resourced and under-prioritised from the schools right through to the elite performers and companies. Music has money, teachers, resources, structures and a powerful lobby. Dance trails behind it in every one of these aspects. The recent Dance Manifesto - which Bussell was involved in launching with Dance UK - has so far had much less impact on public policy than the influential Music Manifesto. Someone somewhere urgently needs to align the current dynamism of British dance with a network of properly funded teaching and training that can produce not just the next Darceys but the wider public goods - in health, in behaviour, in community relations and in the art form itself - that dance offers.
Covent Garden's chief executive Tony Hall has recently completed a strategic review of dance provision for Whitehall's education and culture departments. Hall's review has identified secondary schools as the weakest link in the current dance provision chain. Hall proposes the training and recruitment of a new generation of dance teachers to provide a stronger dance option in the curriculum. The schools minister Lord Adonis - who has played a key role in the White Lodge renovation - is believed to be enthusiastic about Hall's plans and may make an announcement this month.
Dance provision is not about training prima ballerinas. There will always only be one Darcey Bussell. But her successors are out there somewhere, providing they get their chance and we have the will and the means to discover them. After watching Bussell rehearse for the last time, I travelled down to inner-city Peckham to watch a class of seven and eight year olds rehearsing the Carnival of the Animals as part of the Royal Ballet's Chance to Dance programme. The two rehearsals could not have been farther apart on the spectrum. But the invisible line that connects them must never be cut.
·Darcey Bussell's Farewell: Live is on BBC2, Friday, 9pm