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08/01/2010 The 10 best dancers

From ballet and modern dance is experiencing a real boom. But for balance, strength and acuteness, who has the best moves?

Vaslav Nijinsky

Born in 1890, Nijinsky trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, where his amazing virtuosity swiftly became apparent. As the star of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes,his intense characterisations in new-wave ballets like Scheherazade, Carnaval and Petrouchkabrought him a huge European following. "Nijinsky never touched the ground, but laughed our sorrows and passion in the air," wrote one of the spectators. His reputation grew with the choreography of a number of modernist works, and his mid-20 he is showing signs of schizophrenia, with animal premature, would end his career.

Josephine Baker

Three-quarters of a century before Beyoncé, there was Josephine Baker, the "Black Pearl" of the Folies Bergères. Born into poverty in 1906, Baker became a chorus dancer in the jazzy vaudeville shows of the Harlem Renaissance before, at the age of 19, launching a career in Paris. Funny, flirty and entrancingly sexy, she shocked many, but tantalised many more, by appearing practically naked on stage. In her most famous number, the Danse Sauvage, she sent up prevailing notions of race with a fabulously provocative shimmy in nothing but a skirt of bananas.

Fred Astaire

You can freeze-frame a Fred Astaire dance sequence at any point and the image is always perfect. The Astaire hallmarks, evident in the nine RKO pictures he made with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, were a supreme musicality and poise. He'd glide across the screen with that nonchalant half-smile, in an effortless hailstorm of tap, and make it look so easy you were sure you could do it yourself. But Astaire was more than a dancer: he was the embodiment of an era; defined, like the man himself, in elegant black and white. Those shimmering ballrooms are gone, but the films are ours forever. He was, quite simply, the greatest.

Michael Clark

His career has been well documented: the transgressive choreography with its punk styling, the descent into heroin addiction and the long climb back. All of which serves to distract from Michael Clark's superlative gifts as a performer â€" most evident in the years when he was dancing other people's work. His finest performances were with Ballet Rambert, which he joined in 1979, aged 17, and where he became the muse of artistic director Richard Alston. Clark's mesmerising interpretation of Alston's spare, reverberant Soda Lake remains, for me, the stand-out performance of late 20th century British contemporary dance.

Yuri Soloviev

"If you think I'm good, you should see Soloviev," said Rudolf Nureyev after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961. The finest of the post-war generation of Leningrad male dancers, "Cosmonaut Yuri" combined a phenomenal jump with supreme clarity and refinement of technique. Several of his performances are preserved on film, notably Kirov Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty, and the reverence in which he held classical dance is apparent in every step. An enigmatic and intensely private figure, Soloviev was found dead at his dacha in 1977. The cause was a gunshot wound to the head, probably self-inflicted.

Gelsey Kirkland

Few ballerinas have battled as many demons as the elfin Gelsey Kirkland. After six brilliant years at New York City Ballet, which she joined in 1968 at the age of 15, Kirkland joined American Ballet Theatre, where she became the partner, offstage and on, of the Soviet-born superstar Mikhail Baryshnikov (above). Twelve years later, traumatised by the failure of her relationship with Baryshnikov and bedevilled by anorexia and cocaine addiction, she left the stage. But she could produce performances of translucent intensity. Her Juliet, at Covent Garden, was for my money the most heart-rending interpretation ever.

Nadezhda Pavlova

In 1973 an unknown 16-year-old student from the Perm Ballet, the USSR entered the Moscow International Ballet Competition, and before the heavyweight panel of judges, and from professional athletes, held a series of excerpts from Nutcracker . Pavlov s 'performance (which, fortunately, caught on film ), was so joyous, so intoxicating in its perfection, that the judges gave her the rarely awarded Grand Prix. Thereafter, her story would be a sad one. Recruited to the Bolshoi, an unhappy marriage and Pavlova's fragile sense of self caused a gradual decline. Into that first thrilling performance, though, she poured the hopes and dreams of a lifetime.

Carlos Acosta

Altynai Asylmuratova

St. Petersburg was the cradle of genius for ballet century and half, but for pure radiance, some of its stars corresponds Asylmuratova. Born in Kazakhstan, she joined the Kirov Ballet in 1978, aged 17, and became noted a copy of the company 's light, gentle style support. As Odette in "Swan Lake" or Nikiya in La Bayadère, her pearlescent beauty was matched by a bewitching expressiveness. She used her arms, in particular, to mesmerising effect, drawing you into her tragic, lunar realm. Yet Asylmuratova was the most grounded of individuals. In 2000 she was appointed director of the Vaganova Ballet Academy, where she herself had trained, and retired from dancing without a backward glance.

Alina Cojocaru

In April 2001, Sir Anthony Dowell, then director of the Royal Ballet, promoted 19-year-old, Bucharest-born Alina Cojocaru to the rank of principal dancer. The ritual was enacted onstage, after a performance of Giselle which, in the view of many critics, aligned Cojocaru with the very greatest interpreters of the role. Tiny, imperious, and every perfectly proportioned inch the temperamental ballerina, Cojocaru is a performer of heart-stopping loveliness. Her emotional range is profound, her balletic line as supple and fine-drawn as a Toledo rapier-blade. A once-in-a-generation phenomenon, to be sought out and seen at any cost.

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