'Sawdust and Tinsel' reviews 'Room of Cooks' reviews 'Cheating Lying Stealing' reviews

"I normally almost a big piece a year, and then we have this thing called the mini tour - Dance Bites - and I normally do something for that as well, and sometimes I also go away and do things abroad, but for the Royal, this is unusual."

But, as far as 'When We Stop Talking' is concerned: "Although the piece was actually made this time last year, it went on in February, but for the public it's three pieces within nine months. That's just how the season blocked out. I didn't expect to get this piece [Sawdust and Tinsel], it was a surprise. I didn't know about it until January - they thought they'd told me about it last September. Come January, they said 'What are you going to do at the Wells?'. I had to get that together pretty quickly!"

All three were created for very different stages. "We opened up the Barbican stage. The way the other two pieces ['Rake's Progress' and 'Birthday Offering'] were done made it look like a letter box and we weren't interested in that. I went to see a load of things at the Barbican - it's such a bizarre space with two big pillars at the back - it's quite shallow but very wide, so we just wanted to make it specific to our space and blow it up, really. And this is the Wells, which we haven't seen yet!

"It's a fairly big set, so I hope it's going to be all right." When I mention that the rumour that there's no room in the wings at Sadler's Wells for scenery, he adds: "I know. We're supposed to go there in July as well, next year, and do 'Fearful Symmetries' which has a huge set. They put it up - the stage space is big enough but there's nowhere to store it." Since then, it appears that there isn't room for 'Fearful Symmetries' at the Wells. At least there was room for the Royal Ballet. Page was dubious about whether they could fit in or not.

He pulls his influences from a wide variety of work. All through the interview he keeps on asking me if I've seen various productions, ranging from his own work, to the Royal Opera's 'Turn of the Screw' to a Woody Allen film. I keep on having to say 'no' as well, which gets more than a bit embarrassing.

He shows me the plans for the set, a curved walkway and a tent canopy hanging down. "There were other things as well, but the budget wasn't big enough so we had to get rid of them, so that coloured strip of floor is gone. We've only got one technical rehearsal before the dress rehearsal to get up lighting and so on. It's really tight."

So which comes first, the set or the movement? In a field like dance where movement is the raison d'être, obviously any limitations or change in the shape - like the planned walkway in 'Sawdust and Tinsel' - will affect the choreography. "I'll have chosen the music and through choosing it, I'll have a pretty strong initial idea of what the piece will be like, and then I'll start talking to the designer. If it's a score that's being written, then it's the composer I talk to first. The music comes first, but here the music was there already."

A thought strikes him. "Actually we didn't talk all that early on because I was busy putting the Barbican piece on, so it's all happened since July."

So the relationship isn't as straightforward as telling a designer what he wants? "It's more complicated than that. Just through talking about things and making references - I'll give him some videos and things. We looked at Miro paintings and a photo book about the circus. You just pull all that together. Although I nearly always have a pretty clear idea of what I want the set to be like and how I want to use it and that was pretty much my suggestion. He actually came up with came with almost exactly what was in my head."

Working with the designer (Jon Morrell) in the past, helps: "You get to sort of second-guess each other. You know the area of work you're interested in doing."

The circus idea came from the music - an extract from Clarinet Sonata and Concerto for Two Pianos by Francis Poulenc. Page had been considering using the music for some time, but his plans for the music had changed over time. "If I had done it in the early 90s it would have been a straight dance piece. Since 1996, I've been working a bit more with narrative - character rather than narrative - and situations rather than stories, so going back to listen to the music again after about a year or so, it hit me that it was not a straight dance piece. It was too episodic and too suggestive. It's quite camp in places, it's outrageously raunchy and quite explosive, and then it's cheeky, then it's quite sad and fragile and melancholic.

"It's got that kind of duality that I find very much what the circus is about - surface glitter and then quite brutal lives that they lead. The sadness of clowns and the sort of intrigue and domestic squabbling that must go on."

He breaks off to ask me about 'Shadows and Fog', a Woody Allen film partly based in the circus. By now I'm relieved that I've at least seen one thing he's talking about. "Things like that I draw from." Inevitably the film 'Freaks' pops up: "That's the dark side, and at some point I will make a piece about the dark side of the circus. This is fairly sort of light. The other thing is that I wanted to an antidote to 'Cheating Lying Stealing' which was very dark. I wanted to make something which was quite light and easy on the eye and they asked me for an opening piece."

Some things haven't changed from other work of his: this is still very much about relationships and triangles, in this case a clown (Edward Watson), a lion tamer (at this point, Leire Ortueta standing in for an injured Zenaida Yanowsky) and an illusionist (Jonathan Cope). Another "triangle" work of his, 'Room of Cooks', is being revived during the same season.

"That's dark!" he comments. Fortunately, "it came back to them [the cast] really quickly" so it took up comparatively little rehearsal time.

Dance Bites, where 'Room of Cooks' premiered, was effectively a scale down for him. He was "thrown in at the deep end" of choreography by creating work for the Opera House stage. But would it have been easier to begin on a smaller scale? "I don't think so. I probably would have learnt my craft a bit faster but what it did was make me use very strong design and use it right from the beginning. I've never been frightened of that. If you do lots of little chamber things, to make that transition to a big stage from when you had complete control over something small . . . it's actually much easier to come back to something small, which is another art, altogether. So it kind of happened back to front for me, with the mini tours. But I think I make more use of the mini-tours than I would if I'd been starting now. It feeds back into the big pieces."

The current problems at the ROH sneak in when the Festival Hall season is mentioned "it could be the end" he says. He's not sure if he'll have time to reappear as an Ugly Sister in 'Cinderella' (I'm definitely a fan of his in that role) because he's tied up with choreographic commitments. "I'm going to Paris to make another piece for the students of the Conservatoire. I did it in 1995 and it went really well, so that's in November."

His next project with the Royal Ballet is scheduled for when - "if!" we both agree - the Opera House reopens. "One of the early ballet programmes is going to be some new work and I've been asked to do something for that." He has music, or rather a composer, lined up. It remains to be seen if he has a space to stage it all in.