If you use those basic principles every day, they permeate into what your work is about.”We spend our lives training our bodies but we actually end up using them in a very restrictive way. Over the years, just walking into a gym people have said to me, ‘Oh, you’re a dancer’ – and that’s just the way I walk! The training starts making people very similar, it takes out the individuality because we all have this perfect arabesque to aspire to Yet actors can do Hamlet 40 different ways. Nobody says, ‘You must do it like Olivier.’ It’s one of the few trainings I know where you are not asked to give your personal interpretation. There’s an interesting parallel between social etiquette and what dance often speaks about and what it’s power often is, ie uniformity, niceness.” In Bound to Please, the whole rigid, life-denying business is summed up in the arabesque. “I think it’s the first time in 11 years we’ve done an arabesque I’m intrigued by it. What does an arabesque mean? What is it about? Why is it done so often?”In Bound to Please I raise the question by looking at the metaphor of dance and unison and doing things as agreed. Why do we get so upset when we see somebody who isn’t jumping and landing at the same time as everyone else? We go, ‘Oh, they’re not professional.’ What does that say about us?”Not only do the steps need to be performed just so, the dancers themselves have to look the part.

“Most dance is executed by people who are very similar in terms of body shape and age range. How many old dancers do you find? How many fat dancers? How many balding dancers?”For Newson, this insistence on physical perfection is symptomatic of the body fascism that lies at the heart of all physical culture. This mass cloning of perfect specimens doesn’t just suppress the dancers’ individuality, it can actually inhibit a choreographer’s creativity – a view he shares with William Forsythe: “It’s got a lot to do with the raw material. There is very little extremely challenging work being made because dance is so much about obedience: people can execute the steps fine but can’t actually think about the reason behind them. I remember my brother saying to me once, ‘What can you do after 10 years of training?’ and I said, ‘A triple pirouette’ – which is, after all, a major accomplishment – and he said, ‘Is that it?’.”Such an earnest concern to transplant a brain into current dance output might cause a delicate audience to get its coat, wary of new dance practitioners who suck the life out of what should be a vibrant theatrical form and leave punters glassy-eyed in shock at the desiccated spectacle that results. A glance at Newson’s track record should lay such fears to rest.

Newson may wear his psychology degree on his sleeve but he never loses sight of the need to delight as well as instruct. Just like Enter Achilles and MSM before it, Bound to Please promises to be lubricated with humour, without which – as Newson would be the first to admit – his behavioural treatise would risk disappearing up its own arabesquen’Bound to Please’, Cambridge Arts Theatre (01223 503333) to Sat; High Wycombe Swan, 2-3 April; Glasgow Tramway, 10-12 April; Warwick Arts Centre, 25 April; Gardner Arts Centre, Brighton, 23-24 May; Lyceum Sheffield, 30 May; QEH, London, 1-3 August. A one-man show can be a canny way of keeping a career going through lean periods. Gielgud, for example, spent so many years touring The Ages of Man that he worried about ever being able to act with other people again. Assemble the greatest hits of a distinguished writer, throw in some commentary and anecdote and, well, it beats busking in the Underground. From 1961, when he devised it, until a tour just a few years before his death in 1978, The Importance of Being Oscar was a mainstay to Micheal MacLiammoir, the egregious co-founder of Dublin’s Gate Theatre. In his book Being an Actor, Simon Callow gives a funny and affectionate account of the performer at a time when he was so nearly blind that it was only by swathing the stage in his own dazzlingly patterned carpet that he could prevent himself toppling over the edge.