Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a dancer. As a boy who'd suffered from polio, he was sent to

dancing classes to strengthen his legs and by the time he was 22 he'd become the

star of the Ballet Rombre. Ten years after that he created and danced a

flamboyant masterpiece, cruel garden, based on the life of the Spanish poet Locker.

A choreographer of international renown, He's worked for the London Festival

ballet and the Houston Ballet, but he returned five years ago to the school which had

trained him. The Rombert Company had hit hard times, but by building bridges between the modern and the classical he's

brought it back into the limelight. Nevertheless there are days he says when I

clutch my head and think I can't do this job anymore. He is Christopher Bruce. Is it that bad, Chris, you've

compared it to being a football manager, is it so stressful?

There are bad days, but there are also days when the rewards are so enormous that one quickly forgets those head

clutching days.

So the rewards are in the dance itself.

The stress is presumably about money.

It's partly money because like many arts

organizations in this country we're very underfunded but the rewards are in

seeing the performances of what I think is a very great company at the moment.

But it's not about audiences, the audiences are there, aren't there? You get big ones.

We do very well for contemporary dance, which is not obviously as popular as the classical ballet, we get an

audience which is much larger than any of the contemporary dance company in this country.

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