As its 10th anniversary tour approaches, Ballet Ireland has established the highest standards, though it is dancing on a shoestring, according to its co-founders

STRANGE BUSINESS, classical ballet. Go to a performance and what do you see? Effortless pirouettes and pliés, bodies sailing through the air - it's all poise and gravity-defying grace. Sit in on a rehearsal, however, and it's more like fur and feathers flying. As Ballet Ireland prepares for its 10th anniversary tour of Swan Lake, the physical and mental energy expended in the studio at Dublin's DanceHouse would be enough to lift a rocket, never mind a ballerina, into orbit.

Four gorgeous young dancers in tutus are being put through their paces for the Dance of the Little Swans, a fiendishly intricate cameo which requires them to move as one across the stage, all eight hands interlinked, executing a series of rapid leg movements as they go. They're made to do it again. And again. Then they rejoin the flock - a truly international flock which includes dancers from Japan, New Zealand, Hungary, Brazil and Kazakhstan - for the dance of all the swans. But the ballet mistress isn't happy. Classical ballet isn't all about fluid necks and elegant hands. You need to learn how to run like a swan as well.

"You can't run with a tunnel between your legs, ladies. Do it this way. Oh, right. So it is possible . . ."

For a decade now, Ballet Ireland has been making the impossible happen, mounting touring productions of the best-known works in the classical canon.

"We're doing Swan Lakeagain this year because it was one of our first productions," says dancer and choreographer Günther Falusy who, with Dublin-born Anne Maher, founded the company in 1997.

"It's a very important anniversary for us," adds Maher. "And we really do feel we have a perfectly scaled production of this beautiful ballet for Irish stages, and the environment in which we're operating."

"An all-Irish company producing Swan Lakein Ireland - that is important also," says Falusy. "That was always our aim, to make the classical repertoire. Last year we did Nutcrackerin the autumn and we also did an evening of Oscar Wilde - still classical, but different. But of course, we have to look at money. You know what I mean? Art without money is impossible. And this piece will sell."

Accusations that classical ballet is in danger of becoming a museum art, dedicated to preserving works of the past rather than developing new ones, don't impress him one bit.

"How many thousands of museums are there from all around the world with paintings that are 500 years old?" he demands. "And people go to see them all the time. They don't go only to contemporary art exhibitions."

That said, it's a particularly difficult time for a small Irish ballet company. Every other month, it seems, visiting Russian groups - spin-offs from the mammoth Bolshoi and Kirov organisations - offer the big mainstream works in Irish theatres. Comparisons are unfair, perhaps; but comparison is the name of the artistic game.

"The attitude is that the Russians are the best dancers - but that's not a fact," Falusy says. "They are good. But since the fall of communism, they don't have the whip behind them any more." They've still got a big population from which to choose, but the discipline is gone, he claims, and that impressive ballet infrastructure is gradually breaking down. "In the past, if the head of the Bolshoi didn't get everything he wanted, he used to phone the prime minister. Now, the politicians don't want to know." Give it 10 years, he says. See how good the Russians are then.

BALLET IRELAND, MEANWHILE, is funded by the Arts Council, but it's still, according to Falusy, dancing on a shoestring.

"This company runs with two people," he says, indicating himself and Maher. "What we have done over the past 10 years, nobody can do it again. If we didn't work 24 hours a day and for no money, it wouldn't work."

He's not kidding, as a glance at the company's forthcoming touring schedule confirms.

"Last year we had an audience of 27,000 people in our tours," he says. "I can only say 'thank you' to them. They always come and support us. Without that we would not exist since five, six years."

Falusy was born in Vienna and trained with the Vienna State School of Ballet, dancing all the great classics from Sleeping Beautythrough Coppeliato Giselle. He has, in fact, been on stage for more than half a century, ever since he made his debut in Kiss Me Kateat the Volksoper as a seven-year-old. How difficult has it been for somebody steeped in the culture of central Europe to plonk a classical ballet company in a country such as Ireland, where we have little or no indigenous tradition of classical dance?

"It's unbelievable," he says. In Europe, he explains, ballet is seen as part of a seamless artistic continuum which includes painting, sculpture, literature and music. "I thought it would be easy to establish a ballet company, that people would jump in because they'd see that that was what was missing from their culture. That was my mistake."

Falusy is tired and has been ill and speaks of retiring - though frankly, it's hard to imagine a man who hasn't had a holiday in half a century taking to retirement in a major way.

Maher is much more upbeat. She, too, is a trained dancer, and is clearly settling in for another 10 years of balletic action. "Günther has developed a standard and a model for this company over the past 10 years, and I think he has created a legacy for us that leaves us in a fantastic place," she says. " We have terrific support - not necessarily financial, although, please God, the funding won't be chopped this week, which is a different story."

Having commissioned a report on ballet in Ireland, the Arts Council has employed a dance consultant to implement its recommendations over the coming years, a move Maher regards as hugely encouraging.

Back in the studio, the dancers are still pounding the boards. Close in, you can hear them panting, see tiny beads of sweat on their foreheads. Those oh-so-dainty tutus are attached to vicious straps which leave red weals on slim shoulders. Some legs, I now see, sport bandages. But then the familiar music sobs and soars, and magic settles on the room. Oh, a strange business and no mistake.