Review of the decade: Judith Mackrell on dance

From the resurgent Sadler's Wells to Strictly Come Dancing, Britain fell in love with dance in the noughties

It was around 2005 that people started referring to London as the new dance capital of the world, a role historically fought between Paris and New York. The British dance scene has gone through a period of remarkable growth. Ten years ago, I just could not have seen the range of works I now routinely review: in recent months, that has included over a dozen world premieres by major choreographers such as Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Akram Khan and Christopher Wheeldon; seasons of work from Mark Morris, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Michael Clark, as well as Britain's five national ballet companies; and a busy programme of small-scale work.

Despite the recession, these events have been well-attended, many of them sold out, and this is a trend across the country. Even if the numbers don't rival those for Strictly Come Dancing – a completely unexpected national addiction – it suggests that the British have at last begun to shed their historic suspicion of dance.

One reason for this has been the dramatic increase in venues. After decades of being squeezed into cramped and dirty spaces, a mix of private and public money has finally given dance the theatres it needs. Nowhere has this been more evident than the refurbished Sadler's Wells, at last kitted out to be the specialist dance house London required. Since its tentative reopening in 1998, the theatre has hosted nearly all the world's great companies, giving us regular access to Pina Bausch – including the recent revival of her terrifying Rite of Spring, danced on a carpet of dark earth; and a retrospective season of William Forsythe, featuring the harrowing descent into death and bereavement, You Made Me a Monster.

The Wells has kept pace with the widening parameters of the art form, launching festivals of hip-hop, flamenco and Indian dance. Significantly, too, it has recast itself as a producing house, brokering inventive collaborations such as Sutra, in which Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Antony Gormley joined forces with the Shaolin monks on a journey through myth and martial arts; or Push, in which the spectacularly contrasted talents of Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant achieved a rare, burnished chemistry.

A network of other venues have helped London towards its status as Dancing City, including the Coliseum and Barbican. Dance has even moved into Tate Modern: one of the mind-altering performances of the decade was the Merce Cunningham Event performed in the Turbine Hall in 2003, the dancers both vulnerable and heroic beneath the apocalyptic glow of Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project.

Outside London, the construction has been even more intense, with recent builds including Eastleigh's The Point and Ipswich's Jerwood Dance House. These are shining examples of venues where community dance cultures can take root, offering studios for workshops, classes and rehearsals as well as small theatres. Soon to open are new homes for Scottish Ballet and the two Leeds companies, Northern Ballet Theatre and Phoenix.

A lifetime of digital dance

The biggest build of the decade has been the £214m refurbishment of the Royal Opera House, which was particularly advantageous for the ballet company: its stage and studios were finally under the same roof. The new home didn't immediately bring stability, but after a rocky couple of years Monica Mason was appointed director. Mason has been criticised for her cautious approach to new commissions, but she made one radiantly leftfield decision when, in 2006, she appointed Wayne McGregor as resident choreographer, the first artist from a modern dance background to be put into the post. The appointment came shortly after the premiere of McGregor's ballet Chroma, a 21st-century answer to Ashton's Symphonic Variations whose minimalist design and abstract choreography resonated with a passionate, wayward romanticism. People queued for tickets with minimal sight lines, simply to share the buzz.

Dance has also been opened up by the internet. A performing art, it has always been uniquely difficult to preserve and reproduce (the tragedy of its impermanence was brought home this summer by the deaths of Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham). One of the answers has been through the internet, with its limitless storage space, and its capacity to stream live performance. Many companies and choreographers are now opening up their repertories online, and YouTube has fast become the dance fan's best friend. It has been particularly brilliant at reclaiming dance history: who imagined 10 years ago that you could watch old film of Anna Pavlova, delicate, rare but absolutely present on your computer screen? The dark side to all this splashy success has been diminishing support for small or struggling dance talent. As the market has grown more global and commercial, the lion's share of funding and attention has gone to big co-produced projects such as this year's Eonnagata (created by Sylvie Guillem, Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage). In Britain, we have some fine small- to mid-scale choreographers, such as Henri Oguike and Shobana Jeyasingh, but they find it increasingly tough to keep their companies going, given Arts Council cuts and the diversion of public money to the Olympics. It seems to be especially tough for women; during recent debates about the shortage of female choreographers at the top of the profession, many admitted that the juggle between motherhood and work was becoming too pressured.

New technologies may help in these areas: several choreographers have started to make fascinating work directly for the screen, even for the mobile phone. But what's striking about the flourishing of dance this decade is that it has coincided so exactly with the rise of digital technologies. Now that so much of the world has its head in cyberspace, the sweaty, risk-taking physicality of dance has become its most precious asset. In all its non-computer-generated, non-airbrushed immediacy, the art form has never looked more amazing, more human.

Modern dance high: Merce Cunningham Event, Tate Modern, 2003. An experience of large mysteries and intimate detail, which allowed the audience to roam freely among the dancers, observing close up their miraculous articulation and control.

Classical ballet high: Alina Cojocaru's Giselle, Royal Opera House, 2001. When 19-year-old Cojocaru danced her first Giselle with the Royal Ballet, she gave the eerie impression that she must have performed it in another lifetime. Technically, her dancing was exquisite, but dramatically it was transparent – as though she was living every calibration of the tragedy.

Expensive low: Isadora, Royal Opera House, London 2009. Kenneth MacMillan's Isadora was deemed unwieldy and unworkable when it was premiered back in 1981. This revival did nothing to change that, and created a large hole in the Royal's budget for new work.

Best costumes and lighting: Eonnagata, Sadler's Wells, 2009. This disappointed when it premiered, a convergence of talents that didn't quite gel. But it looked divine, dressed by Alexander McQueen and lit by Michael Hulls, who is up there among the dance heroes of the decade.

Contributor

Judith Mackrell

The GuardianTramp

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