Billy Elliot: inspirational? Photograph: Kobal Collection
Following last month's announcement by The Department for Children, Schools and Families that each child will have access to "at least five hours of high-quality culture per week", the government is investing £5.5m in encouraging more young people to take up dancing.
The announcement follows a review of youth dance by Royal Opera House chief executive Tony Hall. New centres for "advanced training" are to be set up, apparently, to support exceptionally gifted young dancers (or "Billy Elliots", as government spokespeople will inevitably call them). All of this sounds great, but it remains to be seen whether the government is prepared to give either scheme the indepth, long-term, properly thought out support that such initiatives require.
It's easy enough to talk about the physical and mental benefits of learning dance, and about culture "enriching lives", but when was the last time a member of this government turned up of his or her own free will, as a paying customer, to see a dance performance? I remember seeing Robin Cook at the Bolshoi in 2001, but that's about it. The fact is, we have a cabinet full of philistine pencilnecks who would never dream of darkening the doors of the Royal Opera House, where Hall holds sway, in case they appeared elitist. A fatuous notion, you might say, but look at Margaret Hodge's inane assault on the last night of the Proms.
If they did risk a visit, certain questions might occur to them. They might think to ask Mr Hall, for example, why such a microscopic percentage of the Royal Ballet company are home-grown products of the Royal Ballet School. If you look at the world's greatest companies - the Maryinsky in St Petersburg, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, New York City Ballet - they are peopled almost exclusively from dancers from their own schools. The result, in every case, is a homogenous, unified, individual style. The Royal Ballet has ditched this system in favour of a year-round globalised scramble for the next hot young talent, no matter what his/her training and background. Chelsea Football Club on pointe, basically. Hardly any of the Royal Ballet School home-growns get a look-in.
This failure to feed through means that British dance training at the highest level is in crisis. Kids are inspired to dance by seeing people like themselves making it. People loved Darcey Bussell because she was the people's ballerina - a dentist's daughter, who had to struggle through the Royal Ballet School when the (Labour) government denied her a grant. Ordinary people identified with Darcey, and she got more kids dancing than any government initiative ever has or ever will.
If Tony Hall really wants to get young people into dance, then he needs to bang a few elegantly coiffed heads together at Covent Garden. He needs to help create a few local heroes and heroines, and sort out the lamentable state of affairs whereby the best young British trainees can't get into their own national dance company. Then that £5.5m might actually do some good.
