hristopher Bruce’s dance career started in a Scarborough pub. One night, after a few pints with a neighbour who knew a ballet teacher, Bruce’s father rushed home to wake 11-year-old Christopher and his three siblings with a grand plan: to send them to dance lessons. “I think he was looking for a way out for his children,” says Bruce – a life beyond the mines and factories. And he found one, a career that for Bruce is still going strong six decades later. If it weren’t for lockdown, Bruce would have been working in the US this year. Instead, the 74-year-old is mostly gardening at home in Frome, Somerset. But one of his dances, Dream – made for for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and inspired by memories of school sports days – is now available online from National Dance Company Wales to mark what would have been the opening of the Tokyo Olympics. At school, Bruce wanted to be a footballer. His father persuaded him that ballet would help him at sports by strengthening his leg, which had been damaged when he contracted polio as an infant. After a few weeks, Bruce knew he’d found his calling. “I’d never seen a dance performance, I was ignorant about the art form, but it clicked with me.” Spotted by an examiner, he successfully auditioned for the Rambert School at 13. The school was based at the Mercury theatre in Notting Hill, west London, a cramped, smoky basement with a coal fire and a bunch of unconventional characters. “It was a place of secrets.” The city became a playground, he says. And the serious graft began, at the hands of the formidable Marie Rambert, who had worked with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and founded Ballet Rambert, Britain’s first dance company, in 1926. “She was a remarkable woman. Totally passionate and dedicated. She was cruel, quite savage in the way she dealt with her dancers – you wouldn’t get away with that now – but she produced wonderful artists.” They fought, and Rambert even stopped speaking to Bruce at one point, but he holds no grudges. “I owe her so much,” he says. “Being pushed into roles I should never have been put in, virtuoso roles I didn’t think I was ready for. By her willpower almost, she made me ready. She made me believe I could do it, and consequently I did.” This was all regardless of his bad leg. “The leg was never strong, was never right,” says Bruce, “but somehow by being very obstinate I found ways of getting round any problems I had.” Bruce started choreographing while he was dancing with Ballet Rambert (an early project was the original Young Vic production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat) and he created a roster of works still much in demand today. Rooster, set to the songs of the Rolling Stones, has been performed by 20 companies, Bruce estimates. He often works with strong concepts and character. Cruel Garden, created with Lindsay Kemp in 1977, visualises the world of poet and playwright Lorca; 2000’s Hurricane (A Pantomime) poignantly brings commedia dell’arte to Bob Dylan’s story of the boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. But he doesn’t like to be too prescriptive. “I do like to leave space for the imagination,” he says. “I love that freedom to interpret” Technically, Bruce’s work has precision and purity, classical roots deeply embedded in contemporary form. “I do not like people trying to act or emote in my work,” he says. “Yes, let the feeling come out, but let the dance do it.” Some of his most popular works are deeply political. Ghost Dances, created in 1981, is about victims of political oppression in South America, complete with skeletal spirits and haunting Andean folk music; 1987’s Swansong depicts an interrogation, with an unsettling side order of vaudeville. He is concerned that choreography now often lacks “content” and individual authorship. “The dancers can make the work look wonderful but when you delve deeper there’s nothing there sustaining it. I want to see more structure, more form, more dynamics, work that has something to say. I need to be somehow moved and fascinated by the movement I’m looking at. Maybe I’m becoming a boring old sod but I really believe that.” The problem he sees is that young choreographers often have little time to develop their skills and voices as there’s pressure to make their names and endlessly create new work. “They need a studio, they need dancers, it’s an expensive and time-consuming process,” he says. “You need time to develop your craft. Bruce was certainly a master of his craft, working internationally, when at 45 he began to feel the effects of post-polio syndrome, a return of his childhood symptoms. “I got atrophy in my right calf, the muscle began to disappear,” he says. “I was told by a neurosurgeon, ‘Oh yes, Mr Bruce, you only have another year to be able to walk unaided!’ He said it in such a jolly fashion. ‘Nothing we can do about it!’” Bruce went to a physiotherapist, who got him back running within three months. “I never did get that power back, but I managed – and until this day I’m not walking with a stick, except on very bad days.” That determination is no doubt part of the reason that in 1994, when the renamed Rambert Dance Company had fallen into crisis, its future in the balance, Bruce was the only person the board wanted to take over as artistic director. He was reluctant, having repeatedly sacrificed time with his family for his career, but it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. In two years he had led the company to critical and commercial success, selling out the London Coliseum and touring to New York. The commitment involved in running a dance company meant “a backwards step in terms of my personal life,” he admits, and demanded a great deal of understanding from his wife, Marian, a former dancer turned designer and sculptor. These days he has a little more time for family (his son Mark is a choreographer and three of his grandchildren are at ballet school). Multiple restagings keep him busy, but Bruce doesn’t have the same drive to create new work as he used to – although there’s one niggling idea that won’t let up. “I have a very powerful idea for a Leonard Cohen piece,” he says. “But I couldn’t get the music rights. I need to get round to trying again. Before I die I want to make this work!” The passion Rambert inspired in him as a teenager is still there. “She made me believe in this magical world, and for me that world continues when I get into the studio with a group of dancers. Something happens in the studio, if the day goes well. At the end of the afternoon you have maybe a couple of minutes of dance – or sometimes you don’t, or the next day you look at it and think it’s rubbish – but the alchemy of choreographer and dancer is a magical process.”