Deborah Bull, creative director of the Royal Opera House's ROH2 programme

talks to Anthony Gardner

What does a ballerina do after she retires from dancing? The question must have been on the mind of everyone watching Darcey Bussell at the end of her recent farewell performance at the Royal Opera House. Bussell's declared intention may be to spend more time with her children, but should she want a new career as demanding as the one she has left, she need look no further than the example of her fellow star Deborah Bull.

It is six years since Bull hung up her pointe shoes and moved upstairs to become creative director of the Opera House's ROH2 programme. It is an enormous job, with responsibility for almost all the House's activities other than productions on the main stage, ranging from a dance and music programme to the live broadcasts on giant outside screens. She has been carried along, she says, by 'a combination of good intentions, naïvety and passionate belief' - adding that if she had understood the complexities of effecting change within a large organisation, 'I'd probably have run screaming to a beach café somewhere.'

An outsider might add to her list of useful attributes glamour, vivacity and articulacy. With her blue-grey eyes and perfect smile, she has lost none of her ability to light up a space, even if it is a glass-walled office rather than a stage; in a red-and-white polka-dot dress, she resembles a bright poppy in a field of muted green. But she also has a reassuringly down-to-earth attitude, reflecting the side of the Opera House she trained in.

'In the ballet world everybody comes up by the same route,' she observes. 'You all go through the corps de ballet: you don't leap straight to principal status, though some people such as Alina [Cojocaru] reach it very quickly - whereas in the opera world you're destined to be a leading singer or a chorus singer and the career path is quite different for each. The Royal Ballet has a few star personalities, but someone like Darcey was always a member of the family, and as likely as anyone else to be joking in the canteen or stepping in to help wherever necessary. In opera, though, that's not the way: the stars just arrive at their scheduled moment.'

As a dancer, Bull was a member of the Royal Ballet family for twenty years - so does it not feel strange to her to be working at the Opera House without performing? 'Not at all - that feels like another life. But what's interesting is that you never lose that link. There are a lot of dancers in the company now that I don't know, but there's still a sense that I speak the language in a way that an outsider never will. And I think it's good for the dancers to see that there is a possible career path into something different.'

She considers herself extremely lucky to have found other strings to her bow - as a television presenter, writer and governor of the BBC - before retirement. 'I got invitations to do these things, and I grabbed them. The moment came when I would look at the casting board and actually hope I wasn't involved, because I wanted the time for other projects.' Most dancers have much more of a struggle, which is something she feels the EU would do well to address:

'It's a bigger issue than people realise. It's a career you're pulled into at a very young age, and then at 30 you're popped out again, which is a hell of a time to start something new. You might have a mortgage and kids to worry about, and there's also the issue of identity: I believe it's important for young people to have some wild time when they're 14 or 15, but as a dancer you're necessarily too focussed to do that - so when your career ends you haven't explored those questions of "Who am I? What do I want in life?"' Dancers, she adds, have many accomplishments which could be used in other spheres - 'Their ability to deliver to a deadline is unparalleled, because there is no deadline like a 7.30 curtain' - but no one has made a proper study of how they might best be employed.

The effect that the EU has already had on the dance world can clearly be seen, she says, in the composition of different dance companies. 'In 1981, when I joined, it was relatively easy to get job with the Royal Ballet it if you were a dancer from the Commonwealth, but not if you were from another part of Europe. Jennifer Penney, Monica Mason, Merle Park, Georgina Parkinson - these were the dancers I grew up watching. The legislation which created a free market for labour within Europe brought about a huge change: couple that with Easyjet, and you've got kids turning up for auditions from all over the place.'

One thing that fascinates her is the difference in taste between Britain and the rest of Europe. 'Take Siobhan Davies and Pina Bausch - brilliant women both of them, but very different. There's a tradition of abstract, lyrical dance in Britain which doesn't transfer well; equally, the narrative, quite expressionist style deriving from Pina Bausch isn't really understood in this country. You always find differences where there's been a long-term subsidised theatre: I notice in America that there's a pappiness to a lot of the new dance which is entirely because they don't have any state funding - because state funding allows you to take risks, and not depend on repeats.'

Subsidies do, however, tend to come with strings attached. Because the Royal Ballet is funded by the Arts Council of England, and cannot use that money for foreign travel, it can only make overseas visits to places where it is absolutely sure of breaking even: 'In my time I think we went to Copenhagen once, and Paris - and that was it, in twenty years.' She would therefore like to see the EU provide more funding to allow artists to travel from country to country - 'And maybe supporting residencies, so that the Royal Ballet might have a residency in Vienna.'

Asked about her proudest achievements at ROH2, she mentions its work with two organisations, Ballet Black and Nitro, which have provided commissions for black choreographers and composers respectively. She is also delighted with the creation of a body of independent artists to work with the Opera House, notably Will Tuckett and Cathy Marston. But above all she is thrilled to have helped bring about a change which has redefined the House's role and its relationship with the public: 'I feel very lucky that people have bought into the passion of it, and the vision.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.