Are the Ballet Boyz about to hang up their tights?

It was turkey farming for us if it all went pear-shaped," says William Trevitt, one half of the Ballet Boyz, recalling the moment, six years ago, when he and his best friend and fellow Royal Ballet alumnus Michael Nunn took the plunge and launched their own dance company.

"Minicab driving," corrects Nunn.

"No, I'm certain it was turkeys," returns Trevitt - and that's about as argumentative as it gets with these two, "the Mr and Mrs of the ballet world," as they once described themselves in one of their shows. The laconic banter, filmed and projected between items of live dance, has become a hallmark of those shows, along with the pair's tough, no-nonsense stage manner, and the tough, no-nonsense choreography they perform.

In short, Nunn and Trevitt have achieved something few would have thought possible when they started out in 2001: they have created a dance culture for the Radiohead generation. Which is why London's Southbank Centre has booked the pair to curate and present a two-night Ballet for the People gala next weekend, putting their stamp on the first big dance event to take place at the newly re-opened Royal Festival Hall. There, between contributions from Rambert, English National Ballet, Royal Ballet and more singular talents from the Boyz' address book, they will add their popularising touch - a cross between walking programme notes, comic stand-up and Natasha Kaplinsky - taking the audience backstage via a live link to chat to the artists.

In their own shows the film element has been shot and edited in advance, and has played on their odd-couple relationship (in fact, both are married to women who are also good friends, and both have children). In their most recent show they did something rather more risky, showing film they'd shot in which Charlie Stayt (of the BBC's Breakfast show) grilled them over their "elitism". "That's a good thing, isn't it?" said Nunn in the film. Not at all, Stayt explained: populism is what they should be aiming for. They were, he said, on the right track by programming a piece by a choreographer who has also made dances for Kylie Minogue. But, Stayt went on to say, they needed more stunts - why not bring on Patrick Swayze! Surely only artistic snobbery prevented the Boyz from collaborating with the star of Dirty Dancing?

What was clever about this piece of devil's advocacy was that it set out Nunn and Trevitt's stall. It made clear that while the pair are more than willing to experiment and have fun (later in the same show they performed a surprise encore as a rock band with an Arctic Monkeys song), they rule out anything whose only rationale is to sell tickets.

"We do ask ourselves why should the taxpayer subsidise our kind of dance," says Trevitt, pursuing the theme in our interview. "When what most people want to see is Riverdance, which makes a lot of money, why do we need another version of the art form that no one wants to see and doesn't make any? The only honest answer is that we, personally, see value in it. We want as many people to come and see our shows as possible. But telling people that we're serious artists probably isn't the way to do that. We'd rather say look, we're ordinary blokes, it's just that we go on stage and do this extraordinary thing."

To this end, the video segments have tended to show the rattier elements of a dancer's itinerant life. "Hi," says a worse-for-wear Nunn, peering into the lens in a car park in Northampton. "It's 10.30am and we're about to rehearse, so I'd better hurry up and shave." We might see Trevitt chat to camera from his hotel bath, or the glamorous Oxana Panchenko try a new move in the studio and fall over and swear; we are privy to behind-the-scenes moments of doubt and despondency, and are left with no illusions about dancers' Elastoplast habit.

"It's been our way of breaking down the barrier between the audience and what can seem a bunch of rather forbidding people," says Nunn. "There's this idea that dancers are serene higher beings who eat lentils and sit in the lotus position. We show them what it's really like: the frustrations and the grot as well as the fun bits. It would be terrible if every company blew their secrets the way we do, but it does give people a way in." To this end they have notched up several series for Channel 4, beginning with the video diaries that gave them the moniker that stuck.

The first series described their troubled exit from the Royal Ballet in 1999; the second charted their two years of rock-style stardom with K Ballet in Japan.

Recent projects have included producing an hour-long film, again for Channel 4 - for which the pair spent three months in Moscow tracking their friend, the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, as he created a new ballet for the Bolshoi. Another was producing Darcey Bussell's five-night farewell gala at Sadler's Wells in May.

"The Darcey thing came about when she called to say her duet partner had been injured at the last minute before a gala last November, a Russian-produced thing. Billy [William] learnt the steps in a day and we turned up to watch a run-through, which was a shambles - not Darcey's fault, she had no control over the production values. And that's one of the things we've always been quite ..." - Trevitt promptly gives Nunn the word: "fastidious" - "... about. So we said, if you're thinking of doing anything like this again, let us make a show for you."

And she did - the farewell gala turned out to be the fastest-selling season in the history of Sadler's Wells. The video element of the show - in which Nunn and Trevitt persuaded Bussell, filmed talking intimately into a mirror while applying her make-up, to be unusually confessional - was shown last month on Channel 4.

So, might producing shows for other people be a way forward for a pair who must be nearing the end of their days as classical dancers, as both approach 40? They say not.

"Producing other people would be risky for us," says Trevitt. "We are so exacting, we'd go mad trying to fit around other people. There aren't many Darceys in the world who'd hand over the reins." So what will it be then? They'd rather not say. There have been talks with the National Theatre. But until all the people they want are free to come together, they are content for it to be business as usual: self-couriering their films to Channel 4 ("do you know how much a reel of edited film is worth?") and rehearsing for this week's gig at the Festival Hall.

There will be surprises in store, not least the spectacle of Nunn and Trevitt performing a tango devised for them by Craig Revel Horwood, best known from BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing. So this is not the same as inviting Patrick Swayze to be part of a show? Well, no. "The guy might be known as the Mr Nasty of Saturday night TV," reasons Trevitt, "but he's also a choreographer with an impressive CV. Wouldn't it be brilliant if this turned out to be a really good piece?" "One thing's for sure," adds Nunn. "We won't get away with looking amateur." s

Ballet For the People is at the Royal Festival Hall (0871 663 2500) 14 & 15 July; Nunn and Trevitt's documentary will be broadcast on Channel 4 in the autumn

Further viewing Rambert's contribution to the gala: londondance.com/content.asp?CategoryID=2063