On the other hand in London you can get an audience that desires dance to go as far as it can go: they've seen the bricks of ideas built over a period so therefore there is an acceptance of what otherwise might seem out on a limb.

Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

Independent dance - and, fine, it's a very good thing that it remains independent - is a much tougher life: all dancers expect that, and accept that there will be periods of not being able to work, provided there are choice moments during the year when they really can work.

There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started.

I don't start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

We could ask artists from abroad to come in too, so that there could be a mixing and matching of skills from Europe, America and here which would widen our world.

Yes - it's the same in any other work - the more you massage your thinking the more capable I believe you are of expanding how you go about things and learning.