With a career spanning thirty-five years, Sylvie Guillem is undoubtedly one of the finest dancers of her generation. This month, following a performance at Birmingham Hippodrome, she hangs up her dance shoes for the last time in the UK.

It’s not an exaggeration to say there has never been anyone in dance quite like Sylvie Guillem. Her career has been marked by a series of firsts: at nineteen, the youngest ballerina to be made an étoile at the Paris Opera Ballet; the first to take control of her own career and leave that company in search of work that fulfilled her; the first woman to segue effortlessly from ballet to contemporary dance.

Those achievements have been built on her exceptional physical prowess. She was gifted by nature with the most remarkable body, flexible and pliant, tall and graceful, with beautiful feet, expressive limbs and the ability to make lines that seem - as choreographer Russell Maliphant puts it - “to go out into space”.  That facility enabled her, quite literally, to change the shape of dance: because Guillem could effortlessly raise one leg in a six o’clock position by her ear, or extend the line of an arabesque sky high, every ballerina who followed her aspired to that level of elegant perfection. 

But the quality that makes her so special, the one that has ensured her longevity as a dancer, is the intelligence with which she has used her abilities, both on stage and off. As a dancer, she revealed a capacity fully to inhabit the role she was performing, to search out all its possibilities, both dramatic and emotional. At the Paris Opera Ballet, she dazzled in the classics, beginning a long journey of discovery in Swan Lake and Giselle, but also shone in new work such as William Forsythe’s ground-breaking In The Middle Somewhat Elevated.

When she walked out, in 1989, it was a national scandal. But France’s loss was Britain’s gain. In her twelve years as principal guest artist at the Royal Ballet, she seized the range of its English repertory: she was a heart-breaking Juliet in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo And Juliet, a captivating and tragic heroine in Manon, and a devastating dying Marguerite in Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite And Armand, which she was the first ballerina since Margot Fonteyn to perform. Yet her quest for new styles to explore led her to ask the company to stage the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s Carmen for her.  
That curiosity stood her in good stead in the third stage of her career, where, as an associated artist of London’s Sadler’s Wells, she has commissioned a series of contemporary dance works from the choreographers she most admired - and toured them around the world. This brought new fans, as well as fresh horizons; the Birmingham Hippodrome and the International Dance Festival have twice played host to her performances, in Russell Maliphant’s Push and in 6000 Miles Away, a programme of works by Forsythe and Ek. 

Ek’s Bye, a poignant solo to Beethoven’s final piano sonata, is the concluding work of A Life In Progress, the new programme Guillem is now performing as part of a farewell world tour. In the year of her fiftieth birthday, she decided to retire, with the same determination she has brought to every step she took. “Time is time, age is age, when you finish a book you don’t need to go back through the pages again,” she told me. “That’s it, that’s the story. I have made it as long and beautiful as I could and now I want it to end beautifully.” 

To that end, she is presenting a group of works by the choreographers she has loved, and whose work is entwined with her life. Not

just Ek but Forsythe, who provides a duet for two male dancers, and new works from Akram Khan and Russell Maliphant. Guillem’s final British performance will be at Birmingham Hippodrome; her final performance anywhere will be in Japan in December.

The tour is an opportunity for her to say goodbye to the audiences who have loved her - and who she has loved. When she was presented with an Olivier Award for lifetime achievement in April, she put her feelings into words. “I never had an opportunity to say out loud an enormous thank you to the audience. I needed the audience and you were always there, warm and passionate. It was a pleasure to dance for you, and I will really miss you.”

Her performance each night is also a thank you to them. She wants to be remembered as she always was - committed and as perfect as she could be. “People deserve my honesty towards the work I am doing. I don’t want to disappoint them. I really care about that.”