All agreed that today’s dancers were less slavishly obedient than before. Without swinging to the extreme instituted at the Royal Swedish Ballet, where dancers can vote away their director (presently Madeleine Onne) after only a year, the Snape consensus was that independence of mind was a good thing.Onother issues, the directors found they brought diverse experiences. The worrying globalisation of ballet, where the same handful of choreographers appear everywhere, companies share productions and dancers are recruited from different schools, is less of a problem for, say, the Royal Danish Ballet. They don’t have to worry about the concomitant erosion of a national style, because they have a celebrated core repertoire of works by the 19th-century choreographer Bournonville, which ensures that their dancers are schooled in a certain way. Nor do the Bolshoi have to worry too much, as most of their dancers come from their own school. (This is a policy that has been neglected by the Royal and Birmingham Royal ballets.)Another issue – how to balance box-office needs with the artistic experiment vital to keeping ballet alive – was a common thread for many, but not all, companies.

Reid Anderson is in the enviable position of having a local public so dance-mad that the Stuttgart company can reach attendances of 96 to 98 per cent without advertising. He has, as a central plank of his remit, the obligation to bring in fresh work and nurture new creators. And having experienced the American funding model of sponsorship and donation, he can fully appreciate in Germany its polar opposite of hefty state subsidy without artistic interference.In this age of MBAs and creative writing courses, some people believe you can train an artistic director, and give them the know-how to hold their own with financial and marketing departments. This is an approach the former Royal Ballet principal Bruce Sansom followed, when he went to study the San Francisco Ballet’s operations and then enrolled at the Vilar Institute for Arts Management in Washington.

Other people believe you can no more produce an artistic director than you can a choreographer – either you’ve got the skills or you haven’t.What is certain, though, is that we expect a great deal from one individual: to select repertoire, hire dancers, commission choreographers, decide casts, put together programmes, deal with boards and administrators, and coach. We also expect them to run companies that not only maintain the heritage repertoire, but bring in the multifarious aspects of contemporary ballet. So, we complain that the Royal Ballet doesn’t do enough Ashton, enough Tudor, enough Cranko, enough de Valois and seems to have forgotten all other British-made work of the 20th century. But equally we talk of a Royal Ballet staidness that contrasts with more forward-looking companies abroad; we give as an example the inordinate time it has taken them to acquire an existing piece by Mark Morris.The Royal Ballet’s new director Monica Mason could argue that it is only possible to do so many performances in a year and that there are only 90 or so available dancers. On the other hand, Diaghilev managed a great deal better with fewer dancers, no subsidy and no company home But then, he was ballet’s greatest director.