Some people say classical ballets are boring, but it's up to you to make them interesting, to breathe new life into them. That's how ballet survives." By contrast the McGregor has a score by the British electronic sound artist Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, and promises, says the choreographer, "a tension between what I make and what the dancers do with it I don't want it to be easy I want to do something that pushes them". "Of course Solor in Bayad? is a role I've really wanted to do ­ one of the things that completes, like, the Grand Slam of ballet roles," he says. Everybody wants to come here." During his three years as an "artist", the company's lowliest rank, he was given the occasional lead (Basilio in Don Quixote, Albrecht in Giselle, the Nutcracker prince), the odd dazzling bravura cameo (the Bronze Idol in Bayad?, Bluebird in Sleeping Beauty), sufficient to establish a vocal fan base.

And last year, leap-frogging the three intermediate divisions, he became a principal.This season he has been given a raft of highly contrasting roles, ranging from the exacting 19th-century classicism of Petipa's Bayad?, to the high speeds and sensual distortions of Wayne McGregor's new, still-unnamed work, in which he is one of the five dancers on whom it's being made He is equally enthused by both projects. And despite an offer from the Ukrainian ballet that would surely have led to faster promotion and bigger roles, opted for a place in the corps of the Royal Ballet when he graduated, "because of its repertoire and its name and the people I would get to work with And also because of London as a city. "I was born into a ballet family so for me it was normal: if a kid grows up in the countryside, he thinks everyone's a farmer. For me, I thought everyone worked in ballet," he shrugs, adding that he's also interested in sport. "It was not until later that I realised it was what I wanted to do."Having won the prestigious Prix de Lausanne and a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in 1996, he came to London as a 16-year-old "I didn't speak English; I didn't know the culture At first I was quite willing to go back to Kiev," he says But he stayed the course. Beneath him a string quartet plays in the plush gilt and crimson of the Royal Opera House's crush bar. If this seems an unlikely promo for Covent Garden, you'd be right, for this is art: a nine-minute film by Sam Taylor-Wood called Strings.

The airborne dancer, however, is Ivan Putrov, the Royal Ballet's youngest principal and likely to be familiar to Londoners as the company's poster boy, whose stripped-to-the-waist image adorned the walls of the Tube earlier this year. For quite apart from his formidable technique, the precision of his steps, the preternatural spring in his jump, his ?ulement, his cheekbones, his smoulder, he is, as the Royal Ballet's director Monica Mason, has put it, "very handsome He has a fine line and beautiful elevation. He's a very elegant, intelligent dancer."The son of two dancers in the National Ballet of Ukraine, Putrov began his training at 10. A man moves very slowly through the air ­ turning gradually through 360 degrees as though flying through some viscous gas or swimming underwater. You can only conclude that von Trier saved a few bob by skimping on the sets in Dogville.j.romney independent.co.uk. In that sense, the film is one of the most acute studies of the film-maker/ producer relationship since Godard's Le M?is.