Sarah Lamb: blood on the bars

Sarah Lamb cancels on me twice before we finally meet and when I discover her schedule I can see why. Over the Christmas holidays, the 33-year-old ballerina has been performing lead roles in both Jewels and The Nutcracker – while also preparing for her debut in Giselle. As the rest of us have been eating, partying and passing out, she's had little time for anything beyond work and sleep.

If Lamb is currently one of the Royal Ballet's busiest principals, it's partly because she's so unusually versatile. To the classics, she brings a crystalline technique and an almost old-fashioned, theatrical glamour; in the more contemporary repertory, she's audacious, clever and fast. It doesn't hurt that even in her scruffy rehearsal clothes, sitting in a pokey office at the Opera House, she still manages to look like a picture-book ballerina, with her perfectly symmetrical oval face, blond hair and milky skin.

Yet when Lamb was growing up in Boston and taking ballet class with her two sisters, she was nothing like a stereotypical bunhead. She holds out her small, pretty hands: "I still have calluses on my fingers because I used to play on the monkey bars so much. My dad had to wrap my hands up like a boxer's, because they got so ripped up. But I loved it."

When she was 15, her version of a teenage strop was shutting herself in her bedroom and reading Albert Camus. "I was pretty terrible in those years," she grimaces. "I didn't communicate. I thought I was an existentialist. It must have been terrible to be my mother." Even though Lamb was clearly a talented dancer, it was assumed by her parents, both teachers, that she would go to university. What finally channelled this unlikely child into a ballet career, though, was the influence of a remarkable teacher.

At Boston Ballet School, where Lamb studied for an hour and a half every day, she was taught by Tatiana Legat, a former Kirov ballerina. A lesser spirit than Lamb's might have been crushed by the passionate, very unreconstructed rigour of Legat's teaching. "She spoke hardly any English, which was probably good because a lot of what she was saying was horrible. You'd work really hard and then she'd point to half of her pinky fingernail, which meant, 'That's how much better it was.'"

Yet Legat was an inspiration and, after four years, Lamb won a contract with Boston Ballet. By the age of 22, she was promoted to principal and remembers it as a happy time. "The company had a family quality and I had very good friends there." But she was also restless. In 2004, she flew to London to audition for the Royal and, even though she was initially offered only a soloist contract, she accepted.

Looking back, she admits it was "hard to go into the unknown. The Royal was a much bigger company, and I found it bizarre that some of the principals didn't even know the names of some members of the corps de ballet." But just as disconcerting was the number of dancers who'd known each other since they were 11, having boarded together at White Lodge, the junior wing of the Royal Ballet School. "This was mind-blowing to me. In America you only go to boarding school if you're, like, one of the Bush children. It seemed of such another class and time."

It seemed odd to Lamb that these dancers hadn't experienced the kind of ordinary secondary education she'd had in Boston. "It doesn't seem right. If children are doing seven hours of ballet a day by the age of 14, it puts a lot of stress on their bodies, and it narrows their outlook on life. It's like starving their brain, denying them full nutrition."

Four years after joining the Royal, Lamb injured her foot so badly that she was off work for nine months and unable to walk for seven. "It was a very dark time," she admits, "struggling with a loss of identity, wondering who I am if not a dancer." One of the things that kept her sane was reading books, including Tolstoy's War and Peace. She laughs when I ask if she skipped any of the battle scenes. "I always think of that Woody Allen quote, 'I read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.' But no, I didn't skip anything. Even if I don't like a book, I'll always finish it. It's a point of pride."

Now, with the injury far behind her, Lamb feels very settled in London. She's married – to a former dancer – and has become more English than the English, at least in her devotion to Radio 4. "I probably listen to it more than most 89 year olds. I could do Pick of the Week." And she's very happily absorbed in rehearsals for Giselle, a role she was preparing to dance when injury disrupted her career. The moonlit, Romantic style of the ballet isn't a difficult challenge for her; thinking her way into the character of its naïve, fragile heroine is. "Giselle has led such a sheltered life – her innocence makes her very vulnerable. She really can't imagine a world of social conventions that forces people into duplicity and compromise. She could never deceive anyone herself, and the idea of someone she loves doing that to her blows her mind."

Giselle will be followed by the new Wayne McGregor ballet The Art of Fugue, which is far more familiar territory. Lamb has long been one of McGregor's key dancers, and one of the highlights of her career was having the rebellious heroine of Raven Girl, his last ballet, modelled on her. "It was a dream come true. It was as if Wayne saw me at each stage of my life: the six-year-old me, the 15-year-old me."

Lamb accepts that there were elements in that highly experimental ballet that didn't entirely succeed. But she's perplexed by other criticisms regarding the potentially sexist nature of McGregor's pas de deux. His characteristically extended duets – in which women are stretched, folded and perilously balanced through a repertory of hyper-athletic lifts – have been identified by certain people as misogynist: partly because they position men as heavy lifters and women as passive objects, but also because some of the more splayed, contorted poses of the women's bodies can be interpreted as mildly pornographic. Lamb shakes her head. "I understand the argument but honestly, when you're being lifted by a man, you're really doing a lot of the work. And when I look at duets by Wayne or Chris Wheeldon, I read them as shapes and lines, the choreographer's aesthetic. If they're beautiful and interesting, they work for me. I'm not thinking, 'Oh, that woman hasn't been on the ground for five minutes.'"

Equally, she thinks it's invidious to expect lifting duties to be shared equally between the sexes as they are in some contemporary dance. "In ballet, women tend to be a lot smaller and lighter than men. We're also rehearsing up to five different ballets a day, which is a great mental and physical stress. If we're having to dance Odette or Don Q, we can't risk that very different strain on our bodies."

For Lamb and her peers, the last couple of years have certainly been stressful. The Royal has undergone a number of transitions, with the arrival of a new director Kevin O'Hare and the loss of several principals due to injury or retirement. Lamb is personally delighted to have had her own workload slightly reduced by the hiring of former Bolshoi star Natalia Osipova. "I think it's really important she's here. I don't feel competitive. Obviously, I think, 'Wow, it would be nice to jump that high.' But she's such a dynamic presence I've already learned a lot from watching her."

Hopefully, Lamb will still be learning and dancing for many seasons to come, though when I ask what her next move might be, she's buzzing with ideas. Having been Equity rep at the Royal for the past five years, liaising between dancers and management, she's very drawn towards a career in politics – though wary of the moral compromises involved. "You have to eat your own liver," she says. "I've just been reading about Ted Kennedy. He was the most liberal member of the Senate, but they've just compared his voting record to Margaret Thatcher's – and he came out as less liberal than her. Can you imagine?"

While moving on to a more contemporary dance style would be appealing, she says, so would remaining in ballet as a teacher. "I feel there's so much more to teaching than just passing on steps. In any discipline you can be changed by one person, and I had that with Tatiana Legat. I owe everything to her. I honestly think she's why I am who I am."