Quotes of the Day

It is Carlos Acosta's 37th birthday, and the greatest ballet dancer of his generation — a man dubbed "Air Acosta" for his legendary leaping ability — is pleading with me to hold our interview on the ground floor so he does not have to walk up a flight of stairs. "Seriously, man," Acosta says in his Cuban-accented English. "I don't think I can make it."

An aging ballet dancer cuts a particularly tragic figure and, grimacing as he settles into his chair, Acosta says he can sense that his time for performing the great virtuoso roles of classical ballet — Albrecht in Giselle; Romeo; Siegfried from Swan Lake, a part he revolutionized as the first black man to play the prince on the world's major stages — is almost up. When pressed, he says he suspects 2012 may be his final year at the Royal Ballet, where he is the principal guest artist. But Acosta is convinced that the end of his ballet career will mark the beginning of an exciting new chapter. Now he is hard at work reinventing himself as a choreographer and modern dancer, shifting to a type of dance that is more fluid and easier on his body. On July 28, Acosta stars in Premieres, a show at the London Coliseum that combines ballet and modern dance — and allows him to start moving away from the form that has made him famous. "When you put on the white tights, and you see some other 20-year-old kid leaping about, you ask yourself, 'Why would I carry on? I've done it so well, for so long.' When is it time to say, 'Enough'?" he asks. "I'm battling with myself all the time."

In the past half-century, ballet has produced only a handful of incandescent stars. Like his predecessors Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, Acosta has, for the past 15 years, set the classical dance world on fire. When he burst onto the scene in the mid-1990s, ballet lovers were ready for a dancer with a regal bearing and a demotic charm. "I've still got it. I can still deliver," Acosta says proudly. And he's right. His body still retains the equine beauty that made him an international heartthrob and superstar a decade ago: the long neck, the meaty haunches, the sculpted abdomen that protrudes slightly, like a thoroughbred's powerful belly.

But while he may look the part, Acosta is ballet's reluctant idol — astonishingly talented in an art form with which he has never felt fully comfortable and that he has long fantasized of abandoning. "I'm not a ballet dancer," he says. "It's never been natural for me, and I've often thought of quitting. But something has always driven me on."

Acosta's success in one of the most elite of arts is an unlikely one. The son of an impoverished truck driver, he grew up in a Havana slum in a one-bedroom apartment he shared with a dozen other family members. His strong-willed and at times abusive father enrolled him in ballet school at age 9 in the hope of combating Acosta's truancy and his habit of stealing fruit from his neighbors' yards.

Young Acosta dreamed not of ballet, though, but of soccer stardom, and many years into his career he continued to struggle against his talent, even as he found fame as a principal dancer with the English National Ballet, the Houston Ballet and, later, the Royal Ballet, where he debuted as a 25-year-old in 1998. Throughout his career, he split his time between opulent opera houses in Europe, Russia and the U.S., and his home in Cuba, where his father — who follows the Afro-Cuban religion Santiera — would treat his son's minor injuries and aches by slaughtering animals and sometimes spreading the blood over his joints.

All the while, Acosta faced the pressure of being a Cuban citizen in the West, forced to balance love of his homeland with the acknowledgement of its poverty and political isolation. Living between two such disparate worlds left Acosta with a permanent sense of dislocation and exile: the title of his 2007 autobiography is No Way Home. "I didn't chose ballet and for years I rebelled against it, believing it kept me from my family, from home, and from happiness," says Acosta, who now holds both Cuban and British citizenship. "But it eventually became not my home but my shelter. I have come to terms with it. But it has taken many years."

Acceptance has never translated into unconditional love, however. Acosta still resents how ballet celebrates the artificial, and turns dancers into literal equivalents of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker: beautiful windup toys performing for the audience's pleasure. "Ballet is a formula and it's unorganic. It is antihuman," he says. "A square here" — he puts his arms out in front of him — "a box there" — he raises his arms above his head. "Humans were not meant to move that way, let alone while jumping high in the air." Worse, Acosta says, ballet dancers must contort themselves into unnatural and painful positions with smiles on their faces, always projecting joy and effortlessness.

If there is, to borrow the title of one of Acosta's favorite novels, an unbearable lightness to being a ballet dancer, Acosta pushes against it with a new show that ventures into weightier territory. At a recent rehearsal in north London, the dancer — his hair unkempt, his blue sweatpants resembling hospital scrubs — moved wildly around the studio to discordant music. But he stayed grounded — there was not a single leap, and underneath the motions ran a subterranean desperation, a heartbeat of discontent. "I am searching for a transition," Acosta says. "The artistry is still in me. It's a question of finding the right vocabulary and language for your artistry."

According to Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, the London performing-arts venue putting on Premieres, the show is sure to be a sellout, thanks to the strength of Acosta's brand and his popularity among female dance lovers drawn to his Latino sex appeal. But will an audience that adores him for the refined beauty of his ballet embrace a more raw Acosta?

"Charisma is charisma, it doesn't matter the form," says Edwaard Liang, choreographer of one of the Premieres pieces and a former ballet dancer. "You can feel it right away when you meet him. But it's especially evident when he is onstage moving. He's very laid-back but he has the extreme intensity as well. That will come across in this show, just as it does in his ballet performances."

Liang believes that Acosta's afterlife as a choreographer and modern dancer has the potential to make him as great as Sylvie Guillem, the French ballet dancer whose choreography has been acclaimed as genre-changing. It's still too early to tell if Acosta's new forays will grant him such posterity. But as he dons his tights and slippers for his last seasons at the Royal Ballet, and takes those magical leaps in which he seems so happily suspended, his smile will be that of an artist longing to be free of ballet's physical obligations. Soon he will have that freedom, and he has big plans for what it will allow him to create. "My generation has not produced a piece of dance like Swan Lake — something that is forever. Maybe we can do it, and maybe I can help," he says. "I dream big. But given my story, why wouldn't I?"

• Eben Harrell
• The world's greatest ballet dancer, Carlos Acosta, is trading in his slippers for a new set of steps