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If ‘recent events’ are anything to go by, the Royal Ballet’s new Artistic Director needs the neck of Edwina Currie, the hide of a rhino and the biggest cojones possible. And maybe the selection process needs a tape measure, callipers to gauge the thickness of skin folds and cojones on the table.

Two tasks are urgent: sort out the programming; sort out the audience.

Sorting out the Programming

Recent programming has been the triumph of the stolid. Ballet is a minority interest and the risk is that the minority will ever diminish, making the huge sums that the RB is granted from the public purse and state run gambling increasingly unjustifiable. However, a New Labour/Arts Council attempt to make a ‘people’s ballet’ would not be the answer. In its current programming the RB could not be any more populist. The new AD needs to investigate, with courage, whether the company is contributing to the development of the form, or simply striving to preserve it in ever more unpalatable aspic.

The bleating calls to respect the heritage reflect, I think, more general British insecurities about crepuscular notions of national identity. As any anthropology undergraduate can tell you, tradition and heritage are never set in stone but continuously reinvented to meet specific purposes. The classics and heritage works of the company should be used to interrogate the present and reinvented to map out possible futures.

After all, any language that survives - let’s compare English to Latin - does so because it adapts and evolves. In the relatively short history of the classical vocabulary Coppelia is Latin. It certainly isn’t contemporary English.

I’m not even sure it’s art. Great artists are technically accomplished and knowledgeable about the history of their medium. But their greatness lies not in their knowledge or skill but in their capacity to move the form to a new level.

If I could go back in time, I would like to be at the first performance of Sacre. And I would like the new Artistic Director to commission a scandal that may become a classic. If we do not create anew today, what heritage will there be to leave to future generations? The Artistic Director must encourage the creation of tomorrow’s ‘heritage.’ But how?

The monastic contemplatives of the Catholic church believe themselves to be the powerhouse of the whole church. A paradox perhaps but the RB already has the makings of its own powerhouse in the ADI. At present though, the ADI is too divorced from the main stage. It is insufficient to hope it will ‘develop’ anyone or anything through osmosis. It has the potential to revitalise not only ballet but also contemporary dance, which in this country is too often predictable, derivative and with genuine innovation sidelined. But what is it the ADI for at the moment? No-one seems to be clear and certainly some of the dance critics don’t get it. Dance needs an adequately funded powerhouse of experiments, some which fail, some of which succeed, but all of which feed the imagination of dancers, board, choreographers and audience.

Sorting out the Audience

Ah, the audience. Perhaps what we really need is an Audience Development Initiative. My last outing to Covent Garden, in the year 2002, was a costly night of syrupy music, predictable design and mugging and miming that you see in the Piazza for free, whether you like it or not. In danger of overdosing on the saccharine and E numbers, I spent the time composing in my head an essay on the gender politics of this 19th century art form. But others seemed to like it. Surely I was not the only one trying to resist the opiate of all that pap?

Nutcracker at Christmas is lovely, like the tree, plum pudding and the bird. But I don’t want to spend the whole of the year bedecked with tinsel, somnolent in a fairy grotto. If the audience doesn’t let the art form move on, it will die or be as exciting as Morris dancing. Above all then, the new Artistic Director needs to educate the audience. It won’t be enough to hold pre- or post- performance talks. Use the media to stir up debate. Revamp those glossy but oh so boring programmes. Shake up the critics who get away with lazy murder. Challenge the audience to thought.

When Balanchine premiered a new work, artists and the intelligentsia rubbed shoulders with the ballet anoraks, as everyone had the feeling that history was in the making and they wanted to be part of it. The new AD should not be a keeper of a provincial old-fashioned museum but someone with the vision to lead the evolution of dance, dragging the audience along by its pearls if necessary.

Oh, and for that reason the new AD will probably have to be an ‘outsider.’ One who is oblivious to the company’s cultural rules that maintain the stasis, and free from the fear that ‘Englishness’ will be lost if things change. Balanchine, a Russian, created the American style and the Paris Opera Ballet became no less French with Nureyev at its head.