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Young dancers are training at a very vulnerable time in their lives, through adolescence, and while they are trying to work out who they are as people, never mind as a dancer. So train the whole person, not just the dancer.

A lot of professional dancers become professional when they turn 15 or 16 years old, when they're still children. So you've trained every single waking moment up until that point for a career that could maybe only last 10 years, maybe longer if your body holds up, if your injuries are kept at bay.

Most dancers are less eccentric than driven. It starts young. When other kids are at the playground, we're in the studio, endlessly drilling jumps and adjusting our socks.

As you get older, the physical abilities decrease, which is particularly frustrating because your brain gets so good! So as you are becoming less technically or physically able, younger dancers are emerging who need the space to perform.

This is the strange thing: Dancers don't age.

But you do have to start young as a dancer if you're going to achieve the physical skills necessary.

We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with.

Dancers are stripped enough onstage. You don't have to know more about them than they've given you already.