Dancing home

Hope Muir is one of the most successful dancers in the country and despite being on the road for the past 12 years, she still thinks of Oxford as her home.

It was here that she was first discovered and had her initial taste of fame. It is here that her best friends still live and here that her dancing feet settled when she moved from Canada with her mother at the age of 15.

Originally she enrolled at The Cherwell School in North Oxford but an opening at the newly opened English National Ballet School meant that her academic career in the city lasted just three weeks. "I went for an audition with 400 others. Five girls and five boys were offered places and I was one of them. I was very lucky. I was in the right place at the right time," she says.

Her modesty is genuine but luck played only a small part. The country's leading ballet school would, undoubtedly, have chosen its new protegees with extreme care.

And, 14 years down the line, she has not disappointed them,. She has been with the Rambert Dance Company - the nation's most respected contemporary dance group - for six years now. But, as with all sports, to be the best you have to be 100 per cent committed and perhaps this added pressure was tough on one so young.

Maybe she also missed Canada or was disturbed by her parents' divorce. Whatever the reason, while her life appeared perfect to the outside world, it was internally flawed by Hope's eating habits - she struggled with bulimia from an early age.

To an onlooker, an athletic bulimic seems an impossibly exhausting business, particularly in one who so desperately relies on energy levels.

"It is only a disease for the strong-minded. It must be, to be able to do that to yourself and your body. So you use the same determination to carry on dancing," she reasons.

"I was an on-and-off bulimic for years until I fainted one day at rehearsals and suddenly realised it wasn't doing me or my career any good, so I stopped."

But she admits that her bulimia was probably related to the art and its high expectations. "It seems to go in trends. Some directors like really skinny ballet dancers and then others go for a more athletic form. It depends on the individual." Those days seem a long time a go as you look at the striking pictures of her in a fiery leotard, posing during rehearsals for Embrace Tiger and Return To Mountains, the company's latest performance.

Her dancing schedule is as unrelenting as ever, with training from 10am-6pm every day, except performance days when training runs from 12 noon until 5.30pm, followed by the show. Working on Saturdays is also the norm.

"On Sundays we just sleep and catch up on our washing and eating. We refuel I suppose. I miss having a family, so I make sure I stay in touch with the people who count in my life," she says.

Amazingly, the friends she made during those three weeks at school in Oxford are still her best mates, and put her up when the company premiered in Oxford on Wednesday. After getting into ballet school, Hope kept in touch with her new friends as she commuted up to London every day. But after two years she tired of the constant travelling and got a flat in London during the week.

"It was great coming home at weekends and getting away from the dancing world, mixing with normal people my age and finding what was going on in the outside world. I really needed that," she says.

Her Oxford friends are her replacement family. Her mother returned to Canada when Hope secured her first job, her father now lives in a different part of the country.

"I can only be on the peripheral of my friends' lives because of my career, but I drop in and out when I can," she says. Hope does have a boyfriend, but because he works in TV and has an equally gruelling schedule they do not spend as much time together as they would like.

It's easy to understand when you consider her life on the road - moving from hotel to hotel, country to country, living out of a bag. And there's the rigorous training and nightly performances, leaving little time to meet up with friends or form meaningful relationships.

But before you start feeling sorry for her, take note that she wouldn't have it any other way.

"I've never regretted not completing my A-Levels. I've had a wonderful life, travelled all over the world, worked with some genius choreographers and musicians and performed some wonderful pieces. How could I regret that? I'm still challenged every day," she says.

And it's hard to counter her argument. But while she manages to stun her audiences night after night, Hope knows only too well that a dancer's life is a short one.

"A dancer's body starts to go in her early 30s. It's funny because lots of my friends who went to university are just starting out in their careers while I'm nearing the end of mine. But it was always like that - I was self-sufficient by the time I was 18, with my own job, money, pension and flat. It's always been that way."

When she retires in a few years' time, Hope wants to follow a different path. She is currently taking an Open University degree in politics, philosophy and economics - weighty subjects for someone who has spent her life surrounded by the arts. But that's the way she wants it.

"I am looking forward to it. I consider myself very lucky because I have had a wonderful dancing career and now I can have a second career doing something completely different. I don't know what yet, but it gives me some choices. Lots of dancers become teachers or choreographers but this way I get to keep my options open."

Fair enough, but when does she ever find the time to study? "I make the time," she says, and one suddenly begins to understand the huge amounts of inner strength that lie beneath the surface of this outwardly charming, sincere, gentle, dedicated character - and why she made it.