North is soon to perform in his tenth production with Matthew Bourne’s dance company New Adventures

It’s like choosing your favourite child!” says dancer Dominic North, when asked what his best role has been so far.

“I used to think it was Edward Scissorhands, then I thought it was the prince in Swan Lake, then I loved being Fritz in the Nutcracker. Hopefully this will be my new favourite.”

North is soon to perform in his tenth production with Matthew Bourne’s dance company New Adventures – The Red Shoes at Sadler’s Wells.

The Red Shoes, based on the fairytale and Powell and Pressburger’s Academy Award winning film, tells the story of Vicky Page (Ashley Shaw) a dancer whose ambition to become the greatest in the world becomes the battleground between the two men who inspire her passion.

North plays Julian Craster, the musical genius with whom Vicky falls in love.

“He’s quite confident, he’s not good with people and he’s very introverted, angry and hot headed. It’s an interesting one to do.”

But North is anything but angry and introverted; despite having been in the company for nearly 13 years, he speaks with the eagerness of someone new to the profession.

“I’ve always had an enthusiastic view on it. I thought, I could be doing something boring, or sat at a desk like lots of my mates.”

He started dancing as a boy, but didn’t go through the rigorous full time training of a lot of the dancers he would come to work with. Joining Central School of Ballet in Islington having completed his A Levels, he began to meet people who had been in full time dance education since they were 11 years old.

“I stumbled onto dance,” he says. “I was doing stuff like football, athletics, rugby. My twin sister started dancing and I ended up waiting for her in the car, so I thought ‘I’ll give it a go’. I started doing weekly classes and then I went to Central and I was doing six classes a day.

“I don’t think I knew what I was getting myself in for. I didn’t know I’d be doing Saturdays. I thought I’d be going back to Leeds every weekend!”

Undeterred and unjaded, it seems he approaches his intensive training and rehearsal schedules with Matthew Bourne with much the same enthusiasm.

“You don’t know you’re doing hard work because you’re enjoying yourself. At the end of the day you’re knackered, but you don’t realise it because you’re having fun.”

Audiences from Bourne’s previous productions will be familiar with his distinctive style of storytelling – it’s never what you expect and always a spectacle.

The Red Shoes is at Sadler’s Wells from December 6 to January 29.

sadlerswells.com