Carlos Acosta: 'Ballet is a lil' bit small for me'

He's done all the big roles. Now Carlos Acosta wants to do it his way, says Jenny Gilbert

It's quite hard being in a small room with Carlos Acosta, and not because he takes up space. It's just that you find yourself not knowing where to look. You try the eyes. No, the lashes are too curly. You try staring at his feet - no good either: they're attached to his legs, and he's sitting with them carelessly splayed and oh dear, try the floor.

Once the microphone has been knocked to the ground, clumsily retrieved and repositioned, you settle on a hairline fault in the plaster where two walls meet, rather as a ballet dancer "spots" a point in the audience to stop him getting giddy when he spins. The beauteous Acosta, if he notices any discomposure, is too polite to show it. Nice boy.

Not a boy any more, in fact, but a man of 30 years experience, the last five of them spent either as full-time principal, or as guest star, with the Royal Ballet. As last Wednesday's Imagine profile on BBC1 revealed, the truck-driver's delinquent son from the back streets of Havana done very very good indeed. The big classical roles of the Royal's repertory - Siegfried, Albrecht, Basilio - are in the bag. He's conquered the Nureyev role in Apollo. He's even wooed La Fille mal gardée. He's pegged for 25 shows a year at the Royal, and the rest of the world wants a piece of him too.

Yet for all his extravagant successes, Carlos Acosta is not content. He is ready to confess in his sensuous Cuban drawl that "ballet is started to feel a lil' bit small for me. Having to be the same person every time, all those prince roles and Giselle. I wanted really to create something, make something different, get new challenges." But when he makes his choreographic debut with Tocororo: A Cuban Tale at Sadler's Wells this Tuesday, he will not be trying to compete with his experiences at Covent Garden. "Don't get me wrong, I think classical is great," he says. "But each time we go on stage, the gap between when it was created and when we're living is a lil' bit bigger. We're living in a world of experiment, you know? It's happening in every field, mixing classical music with rap, Arab with something else. People are looking to find new expression, and that's also my line. I know I can't be Balanchine or MacMillan. Those people were kings of their time. But my time, and my experience, that's what Tocororo is about."

The show - whose premiere in Havana earlier this year was attended by Fidel Castro - is about more than just Acosta's native culture and its heady fusion of African and Latin influences. It is literally based on Acosta's life and times, with a central character (played in part by Acosta's 13-year-old nephew Yonah) who survives a revved-up rags-to-riches-with-added-streetfights career that mirrors the choreographer's own.

For ease of reference, Tocororo may be talked of as a salsa show, but that's not strictly true. Alongside classical and breakdance (another style Acosta added to his belt as a renegade teen), the main dance style of the show taps into Cuban tradition with forms such as rumba, guaguanco and chango, "a male dance, very macho, very erotic". Why no salsa? Acosta is more interested in the old dances, he says. "Salsa you have to do with a partner and it's limited by that. In the folkloric traditions you do your own thing, you provide your own expression." Keen not to give too much away, Acosta will only say that the plot is not autobiographical on every point. But the thrust of it is painfully true, namely the hero's sense of alienation from the culture he grew up in. "In order to gain something, you need to lose something," he reflects. "To get a better life, there's always a price. Then you keep asking yourself, how important is what you want after all, when the price is so big?"

Despite the fact that his parents effectively separated "from the moment I was born", the youngest of 11 children, and despite the fact that his stealing escapades were often prompted by a simple need for food, it's his family life that Acosta feels he sacrificed to ballet. Sent away to ballet school (which in communist Cuba means free hot meals, as well as free specialist education), the boy Carlos "grew up too fast. But in Cuba, everyone grows up fast because life is hard. When you're 13 years old you wash your own clothes. When your refrigerator breaks down, you take the lace from your shoe and you fix it."

He remembers ruefully the name-calling he suffered. He'd get into fights, he says, because they called him "Alicia Alonso" (the famous Cuban ballerina, whose name and face were as familiar to ordinary Havanans as that of Fidel Castro). Looking at him now, and even viewing the old film footage of his vaunting 16-year-old self in the performance that won him the Prix de Lausanne, it's hard to believe such taunts could have cut very deep. Now, he says, the guys on the block all want to be ballet dancers. "Ironic, huh?"

Expelled from his first ballet school twice, it wasn't until he saw the National Ballet of Cuba perform that he decided dance was for him. He was very taken with the men's jumps. He loved the athleticism, and from then on applied himself with a passion. Today it's still chiefly for his athletic stunts that audiences clamour - his ability to jump higher, hang longer in the air, knot and unknot his legs more stylishly in mid-leap than perhaps any other dancer on the planet. He has five more years, if he's lucky, performing at this kind of pitch, and already he suffers pain in his ankles. So maybe it's time that Carlos Acosta, barrio boy-turned-god Apollo, is looking for new worlds to conquer. "It's too easy to say, oh, he's classical now. But it's not like that. I know how to dance like a classical, but they don't know how to dance like me."

'Tocororo: A Cuban Tale': Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (020 7863 8000), Tuesday to 26 July