It started as nothing more than a comment at a dinner party. Asked what I would like to do next, having worked my way through most of The Royal Ballet repertoire, I said that before I hang up my toe shoes and mothball the tutu, I would really like to work with Siobhan Davies. Siobhan Davies - Sue to her friends - is arguably the UK's foremost contemporary choreographer. Although she has very little experience of the ballet world, I have long suspected that she is one of the few choreographers who could navigate the gulf between classical and contemporary technique and, what's more, make the trip worthwhile. A curly haired, bespectacled man across the table put down his knife and fork and turned his attention to me. It was Michael Morris, Co-Director of Artangel. "We'll do that", he said.
Thus it was that two years later, at 9am on a Monday morning, five assorted dancers met - most of them for the first time - at the Mary Ward Centre in Euston. For Matthew Morris and Gill Clarke, regular members of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company, it was business as usual. For Peter Abegglen, Jenny Tattersall and me, all of us dancers with The Royal Ballet, it was distinctly foreign ground. The Royal Ballet's West London rehearsal studios may not be the epitome of luxury, but they are at least equipped with sprung floors, changing rooms, showers, on-site physiotherapy and, most importantly, a canteen. We were about to find out how the other 99% of the dance world live.
Our first day began with two dance classes taking place simultaneously. The ballet dancers - feet sensibly encased in shoes - stood upright at the barre and ran through the plies, tendus and degages which constitute our warm-up. In the absence of a pianist, I meted out the rhythm in a monotonous, droning voice: 'plie-two-three, stretch-two-three'. The moderns, feet bare, lay on the floor at the other side of the room, Gill verbalising the exercise as it progressed: "Picture the greater trochanter as the body hinges forward". Peter, Jenny and I wondered just where our greater trochanters might be. An hour later, though our methods could not have been more diverse, we were all drenched with sweat and ready to work.
Sue arrived, her arms laden with books: designs, patterns, pictures, anything to spark the imagination and provide us with a starting point. She suggested we choose a motif from amongst their pages and set about recreating it in dance. Next, loading a CD into the stereo system, she asked us to absorb the music in our bodies and allow it to inspire sequences of movement reflecting its rhythms and contours. She then left us to get on with it while the CD played its entire repertoire at least three times.
Without rules, movement takes on a different quality. Traditional ballet places a high value on picture-perfect poses. The route between them, while important, is less significant than the end position and the effort involved is always concealed. By contrast, in contemporary technique, the journey and the effort it takes are every bit as relevant as the destination. If classical ballet keeps its kitchen firmly below stairs, contemporary dance, like the Centre Georges Pompidou, wears its workings proudly on the outside.
Over time, the moments of despair became less frequent and a common and healthy curiosity drew our two worlds closer. Jenny was the first to kick off her ballet shoes and dance bare-foot and, despite a painful crop of blisters, Peter and I soon followed suit. I knew the frontiers were finally breached when I arrived late one morning and found Jenny and Peter lying on the floor alongside Matthew and Gill, locating their greater trochanters for the first time in their dancing lives.
The Atlantis Gallery, its vast space criss-crossed by interconnecting runways, provides a new landscape for Siobhan Davies' work and reveals the dancing body from a different perspective. Aside from that, 13 Different Keys offered a rare opportunity to see ballet dancers as you've never seen them before; no proscenium arch, no conventions and, of course, no shoes.
Images: Deborah Bull and Gill Clarke rehearsing for 13 Different Keys, 1999 Photograph: Sarah Ainslie