I'm reviewing my notes and tape transcript of the interview with Matz Skoog: I've never seen so many words and full answers! It's not a statement meant in any negative sense and it was a pleasure to chat around ballet and dance with an Artistic Director who necessarily has broader views and thoughts than perhaps many involved in dance.

Skoog is the Artistic Director of the Royal New Zealand (RNZ) Ballet - a country a long way away: "You look out over Wellington Harbour and you know the next land you hit has penguins".

Skoog is over in Europe to network, politic, chat up choreographers and see his family. We meet over a pot of tea in the large kitchen of a friend's house. He speaks impeccable English and it's a civilised relaxed setting for a civilised and relaxed man. Skoog's is a relaxation born of calm management: he is anything but the temperamental artist or person with little to do. There is a lot of thought here.

Royal New Zealand Ballet was formed 45 years ago by Poul Gnatt, a Danish dancer who fell in love with New Zealand and famously drove taxis to make ends meet while trying to get the company established. The company has had many ups and downs, including a fire, and the number of dancers has fluctuated between less than 20 and nearly 50.

Skoog has been at the helm of RNZ for three years and one senses that things have gone pretty well. Of course they could always go a bit better, particularly if more money were available for example!. But progress has been made and earlier this year the company of 32 full-time dancers moved into some newly refurbished facilities and theatre - the St James Theatre - in Wellington.

Mirroring some of the debate in the UK, the New Zealand company has recently become funded direct from government, rather than via Creative NZ (their equivalent of the Arts Council), and as a result they now have more financial stability.

"We know what we are going to get. It's not a great deal of money. It does not make us a rich ballet company, but for the first time in the company's history we have a secure financial base to start from. ... But the money from the government is also a double-edged sword because we are now required not to go into the red. We can't make a loss."

"Traditionally our income has been about 50% actually from box office. Now with the extra money from the government we can allow ourselves to rely a little less on box office and slightly less on corporate support, although we need to continue being very active on corporate support - which is what we live on. Unfortunately in a way we are almost too much reliant on corporate support. We are very aware of corporate sponsorship, and the whole organisation is kind of focussed around it. Which is very much to the frustration of the artistic."

The RNZ base audience is reckoned to be about 250,000 out of a population of 3.5 million. At 7% it bears an uncanny resemblance to the UK figure. Another way of looking at the numbers is that the RNZ have one ballet dancer per 110,000 population. The UK equivalent must be 1 per 200,000 or so. Neither statistic seems particularly excessive.

And is the RNZ audience all of a like mind? Well not quite:

"There is a large part of our audience that is very bound in tradition and the white ballets and we have to be very sensitive to them of course. But then we have another part of the audience, smaller, which is very contemporary focussed. My mission is to bridge that gap and to make some

"We can perform Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty and some very contemporary stuff too."

sort of connection, partly through allowing the classics to evolve but also to bring our classical dance audience closer to the contemporary and the other way around."

The contemporary programmes are generally only shown in Wellington and Auckland whereas the classical, or more family orientated, tours go to perhaps 7 or 8 locations, though some of the theatres are a bit of a 'squeeze'. But recently they have tried something else:

"... and then we have another kind of tour which we did this year for the first time - not for the first time, but the first time for a long time I should say - we revisited, as part of our 45th anniversary, many of the places where the company has not been for about 30 years. Historically there have been tours where the company in the 50's.... where the company actually went to 121 different places in NZ on one tour! Some would be at the Church Halls at the Cross Roads! But at the beginning of this year we actually visited 45 places. We split the company in half and one group toured the North Island and the other the South Island. It was hugely successful. We employed a different strategy that hadn't been done also for a long time, where we actually put together a 3 hour programme and we sold it on to the community, for a fee, to local presenters, or it could have been the council, or a theatre - for a fee of whatever it was - $3,000 - (and said) we will come and set-up and perform for you and you sell the tickets. And that was hugely successful."

The repertoire was a real mix of old and new with classical pdd all the way through to contemporary with some new NZ creations. There are obvious parallels here with the recent debate about the Royal Ballet being seen by the nation and the RB Dance Bites tour could learn an awful lot from their New Zealand colleagues - indeed from English National Ballet also who have been doing something similar for years.

While Skoog understands the traditional and the need to deliver what people want, he also wishes to see ballet and dance move forward and he has gone out of his way to secure new productions in a number of styles. At the family end there is to be a Peter Pan (from Russell Kerr, who danced with Festival Ballet some years ago and who also did the NZ Swan Lake) and a new Sleeping Beauty

"This beautiful production is traditional at heart, pays homage to Petipa at all the right moments and is packed full of brilliant dancing... it is one of the Company's finest achievements" Rod Biss, Sunday Star Times, on Kim Brandstrup's Sleeping Beauty.

recently materialised from Kim Brandstrup, but in a "simpler and purer framework" to suit the number of dancers they have:

"For a small dance company I don't think you can produce the full thing - I don't think you should try, because it's going to look rather mediocre."

On the contemporary side Skoog has recently acquired a piece by Jiri Kylian, something of which he is justifiably proud. He has also commissioned work by three NZ based choreographers (Douglas Wright, Shona McCullagh and Eric Languet) and a fourth commission is in the process of being awarded. Skoog is rightly pleased to be developing talent but he also casts an eye over the wider world stage:

"Bruce and Kylian are the people that I particularly like. And of course I'd like to have something by Mark Morris - I'm particularly interested in him as well and a couple of others. I wouldn't bring Billy Forsythe to NZ because that wouldn't be right - it would not suit us. Although I like Twyla Tharp, I wouldn't bring her either because as it turns out she is so expensive... no it just wouldn't be responsible to pay that sort of fee." Being a gentleman, and English to boot, I didn't ask just how expensive expensive is - shame on me!

Skoog would particularly like something from Christopher Bruce: "I haven't got any of Christopher's works out there and I keep asking him."

"I saw him the other day and I said if Kylian can give me work what's your problem?!" Skoog talking about trying to get a piece of choreography out of Christopher Bruce.

It would be particularly appropriate because Skoog helped create Bruce's Swansong - a tremendously powerful and famous piece that has left its mark on many. Strangely Skoog is not sure about having Swansong for RNZ. It's almost as though he is too close to it:

"I felt that piece. It was certainly one of the high points of my career. We all felt that we were at the heart of something rather special at the time. We knew that. The piece is fantastic of course, but apart from that there is something more to it.... the whole creative process that we went through. I think Christopher really managed to bridge a gap that hadn't been bridged before. I think all 3 of us still feel today very strongly about it. ... ... I've never seen it performed by anybody else".

Like many artistic directors, what Skoog and particularly the RNZ Ballet Board of Trustees wants is a distinctive repertoire, something not in the mould of one man (like say Forsythe at Frankfurt) but something varied and yet their own. Building up the repertoire is not just good

"Dance as an art-form is going back towards the smaller production, the more intimate venue and the more personal approach - I mean that's what I feel."

for the NZ audience and dancers, it's also about touring at some time and becoming generally more recognised as a company to be seen on the wider international stage.

RNZ has not toured since the early 1990's and at a minimum they used to tour Australia on a regular basis. Recently a tour to the US was planned, but subsequently abandoned because the finances would not allow - "hugely frustrating" conveys some of the feelings. Of course they would love to come to the UK, and Europe, but it takes time to build up the skills and knowledge to tour successfully and Skoog sees it as perhaps the type of thing to be sketched in for the 50th anniversary in 2003:

"It's very difficult to break into (touring), you need to invest a lot of money, and a lot of time and you need the skilled people to put it all together. As I said, it's something that we

"Of course I can produce a classic if necessary but I don't see myself as a choreographer. Maybe I'm too lazy, I don't know, but I can't."

need to rebuild. I don't have the experience myself to do it. So yes we are trying to build those skills and to approach the right people."

What comes over as we chat is how much of a manger Skoog is rather than a choreographer type of artistic director. The RNZ Ballet Trustees specifically wanted somebody who would not dominate the company choreographically and bar setting Coppelia a couple of years ago Skoog is much happier orchestrating the overall approach and using his address book.

Skoog talks confidently of the management team, budgets, goals and it's something of a surprise to learn that he is the first person in his family to run anything at such a level.

"If you are going to have to work in this business I'd rather be in charge than being told what to do! Much of what you do in the ballet world is done at a kind of immature and mediocre level. So if you have to deal with that sort of stuff you might just as well be in charge!"

"Artists tend to be a little bit insular and often take some sort of naive pride in being totally incompetent as managers - which is stupid! The reality of today's society - the fiscal realities we live in - if you don't have at least a grasp of these issues, such as financial

"It is difficult, it's stressful and it's worrying and all those things. But I'm sure that goes with any similar job and certainly any management position. You are under pressure. People expect a lot from you. It's not always fun - but that's the job. Accept it, and just get on with it or get out."

management and general management, people management, then you don't stand much of a chance."

It later strikes me that his next step might be to join Arthur Andersen or one of the other multinational consultancies!

There were two key areas that I particularly wanted to explore with Skoog. The first was the future, where some people worry about the malaise ballet seems to be in:

"Well I think people should worry. One should worry about ballet. But why should ballet not go on and evolve and develop. Why this desire to see ballet unchanged and remaining untouched when other art forms actually move forward? ..... there seems to be this paranoia that ballet should not develop. If some other art forms had been restricted to the same degree as dance has been, they'd be dead. I'm a great one for moving forward! I come from a very traditional background and most of my career has been spent in traditional ballet and I wouldn't change that for the world. But at the same time my real interest lies in the creation of new work - to see new dance emerging. And seeing the classics evolving - I think that's very important."

Which brought us reasonably neatly to the second question..... because if the future is in new work, what about the concern, held by more than a few, that choreographers these days are perhaps not in the relative abundance they were (and they never were in abundance of course):

"It's probably true but I think you have to look at it in a much longer historical perspective and just because something has not happened in the last 10 years doesn't necessarily mean it's not going to happen again. You know art and dance evolved for 100's of years - let's not be so bloody impatient all the time just because it does not happen now! Dance started centuries ago, how ever far back you want to go, and it hasn't always been great people emerging - there have been big gaps. Maybe this is just another gap. Let's continue working on it and let's not panic! I would love to see another great - MacMillan, Ashton, Balanchine - now, of course I would. But we have Kylian, who I think is a fantastic artist, and a couple of other people. Let's not focus on what is not happening, let's focus on what is actually happening in the world. And maybe it's not going to happen in our generation. We may all be dead before it happens. It's only by focusing on what happens now. Now is the only time that exists! Let's get on with now and from now will spring the future."

Perhaps some will struggle with the thought of the new, but I find it a most uplifting view and wish we heard it more. And it will be nice to see the 'new' in action, hopefully when Skoog brings his company to the UK to celebrate its 50th!