Dancers should realise that they are really lucky. Dancing is not a job. It's people who are chosen. And you must realise that you are chosen. Sometimes I see a performance that makes me really angry - I think, 'Those people are lucky, and they don't realise it.'
I could have done a lot of things on TV, but I don't want to be recognised in the street. I'm not ready to feel that sort of embarrassment.
I love nature like nothing else. Before I moved to Switzerland, my home was a flat in London with a garden. In those snatched moments away from dance, I did typical weekend things like pruning, planting, and weeding. I planted fruit trees and even had a vegetable garden, but I wasn't around enough, so it was a disaster.
When you improvise alone, you don't risk a lot, but doing an improvisation when you are two is even more difficult because you need to listen exactly to understand what is going to happen.
Oh, I could have done more. I refused a lot of ballets. I said, 'No way, no way I'm going to do that.'
Dancers are trained to be disciplined to do what they are told, but I knew that time goes by, and I didn't want to make the mistakes of the others.
I'm not a social animal, and I had a reputation that came before me of being very difficult, of screaming at everybody, so people tended to keep their distance.
I have a strong sense of injustice and not admitting things just because that is the way someone says it should be. I need to understand. I need to agree.
When I am on stage, I feel completely free and just want to let go.
Everything I do, I try to make it the best I can. So I go my own way and give it all I have.
You don't start by saying, 'Well, am I better than her?' Because that goes nowhere. Instead, all your work, your passion, your will has to go into what you do. And then if there is a result, if people like you, if you are a bit different, then fine.
At school, either gymnastics or dance, it was the same. It gave me pleasure to move. And then, when I worked to achieve something new and out of the ordinary, it made me feel good. I felt I had surpassed myself.
I loved being at the Royal Ballet. Those choreographers, MacMillan and Ashton, they knew how to translate complicated life into choreography.
The stage is like a magnifier of thoughts and emotion and vibration; that's what the stage is incredible for because it makes you live other lives. It makes you experience other emotions. It makes you feel more beautiful or more alone or more angry. It makes you feel much more, more, more.
Dancers, you know, they have pain everywhere: ankles in the morning, or back or neck or ribs or knees or the muscles. You are never free of pain, you know.
The first time I took a plane to dance in front of an audience outside France was when I was in the Paris Opera Ballet School, and we flew to Japan.
I think the only regret I have is not to have opened my eyes sooner to aspects of life like the relationship of man with nature and animals.
Dancing pleases me. I hope I transmit that to others.
For someone like me, who as a kid could not have two people in front of me without wanting to hide, to end up on stage with a lot of people in front of me, feeling good, it has to be a strange and special place.
