A scene from In Plain Clothes at the dazzling Siobhan Davies Dance Studios. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
I think I once saw Cherie at a performance of The Nutcracker, but I don't remember Tony Blair ever attending a dance event. This is mildly ironic given that the last decade has seen dance undergo exactly the kind of splashy transformation that the PM loves to be associated with, even if he can't be directly credited for it.
Just look at the buildings. After decades of being squeezed into small, grubby or unsuitable theatres, a cash-rich mix of lottery funding, Arts Council money and private sponsorship has allowed dance to be re-housed in an amazingly glamorous style.
In London alone, the newly refurbished Royal Opera House and Coliseum top the market along with the less expensive but no less state-of-the-art Sadler's Wells. With a dance-friendly stage at the Royal Festival Hall about to come into action, and long-overdue refurbishments at The Place and the new Bonnie Bird Theatre at Laban complementing stages at The Barbican and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the art form has never had so many venues to choose from. So eclectic are London's ballet offerings - modern, post-modern and every kind of international genre - that many consider it to have overtaken New York as the world's dance capital.
Facilities for dancers have also improved dramatically. The Royal Ballet has finally got decent studios and support systems in the middle of London. The Place and Laban are no longer the dank, grimy institutions they used to be, while venues like the newly built Siobhan Davies Dance Studios offer a bright rehearsal space for independent choreographers and performers.
But this isn't just happening in London. Scotland has two spanking new dance centres - Dance Base in Edinburgh and The Space in Dundee - and plans are well advanced for the revitalised Scottish Ballet to get an expanded home in Glasgow. In Leeds, Phoenix Dance and Northern Ballet Theatre will soon be sharing a new home. In Newcastle, Dance City now offers space for rehearsal and performance. A similar project is in place for Dance East in Ipswich.
A new generation of theatre programmers are pumping up the profile of dance, as venues like The Point in Eastleigh and Hall for Cornwall in Truro join the touring circuit for small to middle scale performance. The recently established Dance Consortium, supported by the Arts Council, links 19 theatres across the UK, allowing for national tours of visiting companies to become a regular event. It's not surprising, in the face of all this lovely expansion, that audiences for dance are rising - a claim no other art form can make.
But there is one bleak note amid this bonanza. The problems of funding never go away - the lack of money, the inequities of its distribution - and the final months of the Blair decade have been particularly bad for dance. Like all the other arts, the profession is apprehensive about the amount of lottery money that will be diverted into the 2012 Olympics budget. The recent cutting of the "Grants for Arts" money from the Arts Council of England will have an immediate impact. Small, independent companies and education projects are the seedbeds from which the next generation of dancers and choreographers are produced. Both sectors will be badly affected by these cuts, and some individuals and companies may go out of business.
Even as we luxuriate in the customised fabulousness of our new dance buildings, the nagging possibility arises that there may be less and less British work to show in them. Dance has flourished on the large scale during Blair's decade, but its little shoots are as vulnerable as they always were.
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