The reinvention of Two Feet, Meryl Tankard’s legendary work for solo dancer, opens with black curtains revealing the starkly-lit figure of a carnival doll on a music box. Although the music and role is from Giselle, it’s also a chilly reminder of Dr Coppelius’s life-size dancing doll, slowly spinning to the disembodied “plink-plink-plink” of a music box.

It’s a clue to the reality that ballet seems to be the natural home of Svengali relationships, whether fictional (Coppélia) or forged in the blisters, blood and tears of young dancers whose teachers demand… everything.

Natalia Osipova in Two Feet.  Photograph © Regis Lansac

That demand also goes both ways: Two Feet is partially an homage to Olga Spessivtzeva, the great Russian romantic ballerina of the first part of the 20th century. Her brilliant career began to founder on a tour of Australia when her health – physical and mental – visibly faltered. She was eventually overwhelmed by her quest for perfection and lived out her days in an asylum in the US.

Spessivtzeva’s story is at the extreme end of what every dancer knows and endures: the physical discipline and often inhuman endurance...