We have a new dance critic – and she’s not happy with The Arts Council

Hello. I recognize some of you. We’ve bumped against each other in Sadler’s Wells or Covent Garden or the Birmingham Hippodrome. I look forward to meeting you below the line sometime. This is the second time I’ve returned to reviewing dance after a break. I’ve spent the past year doing a Russian MA to further a book I’m working on, and not going to much dance at all. But here I am again.

Why do I keep coming back to dance? I’m a musician rather than a dance person, really, and there are very few musically alert and visually intelligent choreographers around, capable of adding dance to music and coming up with more than the sum of the parts. I have, like most people, a fairly catholic attitude to an evening out – a string quartet maybe, some tanztheater, or a Tarkovsky film. I have also succumbed to the magic that is Kylie.