The Everyday Dancer

The Everyday Dancer is a new and honest account of the business of dancing from a writer with first hand experience of the profession. Structured around the daily schedule, The Everyday Dancer goes behind the velvet curtain, the gilt and the glamour to uncover the everyday realities of a career in dance. Starting out with the obligatory daily 'class', the book progresses through the repetition of rehearsals, the excitement of creating new work, the nervous tension of the half hour call, the pressures of performance and the anti-climax of curtain down. Through this vivid portrait of a dancer's every day, Deborah Bull reveals the arc of a dancer's life: from the seven-year-old's very first ballet class, through training, to company life, up through the ranks from corps de ballet to principal and then, not thirty years after it all began, to retirement and the inevitable sense of loss that comes with saying goodbye to your childhood dreams.

Deborah Bull was a Principal Dancer with The Royal Ballet, noted particularly for her performances in the works of Forsythe and MacMillan. Formerly Creative Director of the Royal Opera House, she is now Director, Cultural partnerships at King's College London, as well as a writer and broadcaster. She has written and presented several programmes for BBC TV and radio, including the award-winning 'The Dancer's Body'. She is the author of The Vitality Plan (1998), Dancing Away (1998) and (with Luke Jennings) The Faber Pocket Guide to Ballet (2004) and The Everyday Dancer (2011). She was awarded a CBE in the 1998 Queen's Birthday Honours list.