What happens to male ballet greats when they retire?

What happens when a torrent of exceptional male stars leave the stage and flood the jobs market? Especially in a world when classical ballet appears to be becoming less fashionable, eclipsed by contemporary fashions and nervousness about audiences?

The titan of the Royal Ballet and Bolshoi, Irek Mukhamedov, was renowned at Covent Garden in the Nineties for his unique combination of muscle and gentlemanly manners, and if English National Ballet’s men are looking particularly refined on their winter tour of Swan Lake and Coppelia it may well be the result of his stellar coaching last month.

ENB’s director Tamara Rojo invited him over from Slovenia, where he has been running the national ballet, to hand on some of his precious knowhow to her young team of new male soloists. It’s impossible to overestimate the impact in London of Mukhamedov’s arrival in 1989. Most of all, he generated a new forcefield in the last years of the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan – who created Winter Dreams for the romantic Irek and The Judas Tree for the terrifying, brutish Irek, and both were united in his unforgettable performing of MacMillan’s Mayerling.