Longford-born ballet choreographer Marguerite Donlon gets a German state honour today for her acclaimed work in Saarbrücken. She tells Derek Scallyabout fighting hard to make a name for herself

While other women were inspired to dance by The Red Shoes, Marguerite Donlon's inspiration lay between the pages of the World Book encyclopedia. Volume B, to be precise: the photographs illustrating the entry on ballet.

"My whole career is based on the four pictures there," says Donlon with a laugh. The rest she made up as she went along, letting her mind lead her out of the stiff-limbed Irish dancing class.

"I told the other girls I could do ballet. What I did was twirls and kicks and arms everywhere." Not having any formal training didn't stop her from choreographing dance routines for her class at school and winning the Slógadh competition. "The urge was always there: running before I could walk."

Now the Longford-born Donlon is choreographer at the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken and head of a critically acclaimed dance company.

Today, she receives a prestigious German state honour, the Verdienstorden and, next month, she's up for a leading German theatre prize.

All this despite only taking her first dance lesson aged 13 with Anica Dawson in Longford. Following initial doubts, the South African-born dance teacher saw a spark in the teenager and sent her to train with an examiner of the Royal Academy of Dance in Halifax. After sitting her A-levels in Bradford, Donlon was spotted by the head of the touring English National Ballet and invited down to London.

There she participated in morning classes and afternoon rehearsals; to earn money, she helped out evenings backstage as a dresser.

She soaked up a decade of dance training in three years and was given a contract.

"Most people start at seven so I lacked confidence and didn't think I could make it," she says. "I mortified myself so often, asking 'Who's that?' 'Dame Margot Fonteyn!' At least I knew Nureyev when he walked in one day."

Soon Donlon started getting solos, from Desdemona in The Moor's Pavane to Effie in La Sylphide. "The other dancers were a bit confused, asking: 'Aren't you the dresser?'"

When English National Ballet chief Peter Schaufuss moved to head the Deutsche Oper ballet in 1991, Donlon followed.

She stayed for 12 years as a lead, dancing her way through most of the classic repertoire as well as contemporary works. It was at Berlin's Komische Oper that she choreographed her first work, Child of Light, a process recorded in a documentary by Berlin-based Irish film-maker Eoin Moore.

Considering she was choreographing before she could dance, the transition from dancer to choreographer came easily, she says. Deciding to leave the security of the Deutsche Oper ballet in 2000 to go freelance was made easier, she says, thanks to a steady flow of offers from Europe and the US.

Months after going freelance, she got a call from the Staatstheater in Saarbrücken with an offer she couldn't refuse. Today Donlon has every dancer's dream set-up: she heads the Donlon Dance Company of 16 dancers, a company manager, ballet master, press and dramaturgy staff.

In return, Donlon delivers four premieres a season in the main house and a second smaller space.

Paradoxically, she says, being inside the Staatstheater - a huge house with annual subsidies of €24 million and a staff of 477 - has been a liberating rather than a constricting experience. Since taking up the job in 2001, she has run outreach projects with special-needs schools and collaborations with the neighbouring music university, where her German husband is a professor.

Also important for her is the chance to invite in free scene dance companies for collaborations, an attempt to break down the invisible wall that exists between the free and state-funded dance scenes.

"I'm able to get in touch with people for projects, I'm able not just to think of ideas but put them into action," she says. "When you're a freelance choreographer, you think you're free but if you're looking for grants to fund your work, there is pressure to fit in with trends." A creeping trend in the contemporary German dance scene, and one Donlon says she is wary of, is over-dry conceptual dance.

"The danger is that worthy, intellectually laden, brain-driven dance wins out and we lose touch with the physicality of dance," says Donlon.

She knows what she is talking about: most of her pieces are concept works which let the body speak for itself, whether her retelling of Giselle - Giselle Reloaded, set in Ireland - or works based on Samuel Beckett's Words and Music and Act Without Words 1. Next year, Donlon is creating a new work set to Stravinsky music to coincide with a Picasso exhibition at the Saarmuseum.

Even in her concept pieces, she works in humour even at the risk of falling foul of the intellectual snobbery that pervades much of modern German performance.

"There is an idea in Germany that if it's not serious then it can't be taken seriously," she says. "Ballet is the only art form besides music that can give you goosebumps. It's great when a piece works without having to do a load of reading beforehand."

The Irish choreographer has been very successful at keeping her career moving simultaneously in different directions, confounding and delighting critics.

"At the moment, for instance, it's not fashionable to do story ballet, or even show a classical influence, but I like to go against trends," she says. "I like telling stories and I'm proud of my classical influences. I'm trying to get away from what's expected of me."

This season has seen the revival of one of her most successful story ballets, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, hailed in Die Welt newspaper as "the best international production of the ballet in decades".

It's not just a critical success either: at a recent performance a near-capacity crowd the same age as the doomed lovers sat mesmerised by Dolan's breathtaking production. Her classical-contemporary choreography was performed by her company with equal parts insolence and energy, humour and grief.

At the interval, it's not hard to find Marguerite Donlon fans in the audience. "She's brought a whole new schwung to the place," says one elderly woman with an energetic sweep of her hand. She knows what she's talking about: she says she's been a regular attendee at the Staatstheater since it was opened in 1938. Nodding at the ceiling, the woman adds: "Did you know Hitler donated that chandelier?"

After six years at the helm, the Donlon Dance Company has been invited to perform in Berlin, Luxembourg, Brussels, the US and South Korea and twice on the Arte television station.

Apart from one brief engagement in Longford, though, the Donlon Dance Company has yet to be seen in Ireland.

"My work has been performed in Ireland by other companies, but never by my own," she says.

It's an oversight that should be rectified: Irish audiences deserve a chance to see the work praised by Germany's Ballettanz magazine for "bridging the gap between classic and comic, avant-garde and Grand Guignol".

"It's so much fun," the magazine noted, "that fans . . . accuse her of making her pieces too short."