Well I got to be the Director of the Royal Ballet also by a sort of quirk of fate because I had been working for about 20 years with Kenneth MacMillan and Anthony Dowell assisting both of them and I was officially assistant director to Anthony Dowell later on his directorship. When he retired and Ross Stretton came in it was agreed that I would be assistant director to Ross. So my aim was really to be the best possible assistant director that any director could want. To be able to mind-read and be one jump ahead for them always. But when Ross resigned and left after only one year, I was asked if I could care take for a while until I suppose people thought ' well now what do we do' because it was most unexpected. After about six weeks I thought, ' gosh this is really very demanding but I think it could be quite a lot of fun.' And then I was asked if I would consider taking on the directorship; I was offered three years, a contract for three years and I jumped at it. I thought, ' I' ve been here a long time and why don' t I give it a go, I shouldn' t be scared at this point.'

But I' d never really seen myself as a director because I wasn' t a choreographer and many of the directors have been that. I also didn' t have particular ambitions to do new productions of the great classics. So I didn' t want to feel like a charlatan really. But of course what I discovered there are many different ways of directing and again, like one does as a dancer, you try to do the best that you can do. And I' ve discovered that it is the most wonderful, wonderful job and I do love every day.

As Director of the Royal Ballet I do so many things that whenever I have to answer this question I sort of can' t think of any of them. Except to say that of course first and foremost I choose all the repertoire, with the assistance of the music director, Barry Wordsworth, I choose the conductors. I choose all the members of staff, all the people who teach for the company how frequently we change teachers, how many classes they teach a week. I select all the people who will coach the dancers, and invite different people in, guest teachers and guest coaches. With regard to teaching the ballet and mounting the ballets that' s also my decision. Not ever alone I have to say, I don' t like working on my own. I love sharing problems and I love other people' s input and I depend on it enormously. You' re looking after a very large family. You' re trying to maximise the talents of as many of them as you possibly can and you want to encourage them and support them. At the end of every season I interview everybody, minus the principal dancers because I talk to them through the year and I would be talking to them about their rep for the following season. But I interview something like 75 dancers at the end of the season to review their work and to allow them to ask questions and see if they feel they' re having, what the challenges are for them, if they are happy in their work. Just happy enjoying their work, feeling they' re making progress. There are hundreds of things and it' s sort of non-stop.

I think in the preparation of a production, in the rehearsals for dancers, one is really considering the best way to achieve the best result and that can be very often in inviting retired dancers to come back in to coach, especially something that was created on them. I mean there are still lots of examples like that, Antony Dowell comes in to coach the roles that he was famous for and that he created for both MacMillan and Ashton, same with Antoinette Sibley, Merle Park; people who are really my generation but now no longer working full-time in the theatre. But of course Benesh notation is a wonderful system for recording ballets. I don' t know where we' d be without it, I mean it' s extraordinary. Time and again I think, ' this production would never have got off the ground without notation.' And so we are hugely dependent on that and the skill of the people who write the ballets and then teach them in the studio. Of course if it' s wonderfully mastered score it can be taught by another person. I think the ideal situation is a continuity, if that person wrote the score 15 or 20 years ago there' ll be so many details that they remember that a person coming in and just reading the score wouldn' t know about.

I think it' s very important that dancers do understand the background of the works. We do very often put information on the notice board for them to read, background. I know they can look it up in books and everything, but sometimes if it' s the angle I want them to consider we' ll put something up on the board for them to read and recommend certain things for them to look at. A lot of people have a huge initiative and do it all on their own and other people don' t. So one is trying to cater to everybody really, but I think it' s very important to understand how ballets came about and why and where they belong in the history of the art.

I became a dancer sort of by some wonderful stroke of luck really. I started as a child aged four once a week and then I suppose when I was about ten or eleven I became more serious more about it and wanted to do two or three times a week. My mother brought me from South Africa to England when I was 14. My wish, my aim, was to join the Royal Ballet School which I did. I failed my first audition, so I took it again. I was absolutely determined having failed it because there is nothing like a drop of failure for sorting out what your feelings really are. I joined the Royal Ballet School and after one year there I was a member of the Royal Ballet.

I think the Benesh Notation is written on a music stave and it' s simple in as much as the bottom line of the stave is the feet, the second line is the knees, the third is the waist and then the shoulders and then the top of the head. And of course it' s run along with the music, so a bar of dance is written with a bar of music. But of course it varies; because sometimes what happens in a bar is very complex so the bar obviously extends. If you were to look at it you would see some rather strange little dashes and curves. These lines that are drawn on the stave are impossible for someone just to look at and understand. Just as if you looked at music and you didn' t read music you wouldn' t have a clue what it was about, so it is with dance notation.