If you wanted to quantify the scale of David Hughes's talent, you could count the number of top companies with which he has danced over the past 16 years (including London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Rambert and AMP).
Or you could list the star choreographers who have created solos for his current one-man show (Siobhan Davies, Wayne McGregor, Robert Cohan, Christopher Bruce). But the most striking aspect of Hughes's talent is the least quantifiable: how differently he performs from any other male dancer of his generation.
Physically, Hughes is big - fleshy and solidly muscled. Yet his size accentuates rather than diminishes the sensitivity of his dancing. The rewrite of L'après-midi d'un Faune, which Davies has choreographed for him, makes no apologies for comparing Hughes to the original faun, Nijinsky.
Both dancers combine physical gravitas with an astonishing alertness and delicacy. Within the meditative pauses of Davies' solo, you can almost take a reading of the sensations that brush across the surface of Hughes's feet and hands, of how the air prickles the hairs on the back of his neck.
Hughes is also an innately dramatic dancer, subtly impressing each move with the stamp of inward emotion. Yet he remains peculiarly mysterious. His small, neat features retain their own counsel. Even though he seems to be telling important and interesting stories as he dances, his own personality remains a secret.
This perhaps is the clue to his breadth of range. Even though all four choreographers have clearly started with Hughes as their inspiration, he adapts himself to their different styles with amazing versatility. In McGregor's After Pneuma we see his stocky body stretch itself to the wired, boneless fluency of the choreographer's own lanky physique. In Cohan's Adagietto he expands into slow-burning passion, and in Bruce's setting of Bob Dylan's Hurricane, he flips between the characters with a ventriloquist's speed and an actor's intensity.
If Hughes had been a classical dancer he would probably have been a star. But while his career in modern dance has been more discreet, it makes him no less of a national treasure.
