In the 13 years since Rambert’s Rooster was last seen on British stages, the band whose music the show uses have cemented their status as the biggest rock act in the world.

The Rolling Stones celebrated their 50th anniversary with the 50 And Counting tour, with concerts in Hyde Park and Glastonbury Festival. They released their 22nd studio album, A Bigger Bang, in 2005. Right now the four old-timers are taking their ON FIRE tour across Asia.

They’re never out of the news.

Christopher Bruce admits the band’s notoriety has helped Rooster as it’s toured the world but is quick to point out the piece has a strong reputation.

“It’s a ballet I have problems not doing. I have to turn down requests or else I end up not doing anything but Rooster,” he says.

The band are fans as well.

“Mick Jagger came to see it and he seemed to enjoy it a great deal. It was interesting for him to listen to these very old recordings, which he hadn’t listened to for quite a while. I seemed to get the vote of approval.”

Bruce, who choreographed the piece in 1991 as the then artistic director of Rambert Dance Company, worked with Jagger on a video for the singer’s single Sweet Thing a year later.

“That was fascinating to work on. We had dancers appearing out of the walls. There was this wonderful artist who painted on bodies and made them so these tiled walls would suddenly produce a live being.”

And did Mick ask for a few dancing tips?

“No, he didn’t,” laughs Bruce. “He enjoyed watching the dancers and he made a few comments but they were kind of private.”

Bruce says Rooster – with classic Stones songs fused with dance choreography – is aided by the fact the Stones’ music is popular with a succession of generations.

Though that did not make it an easy decision to decide to use the Stones’ music.

“The piece could have been very easily overwhelmed by the music, so you just end up with lot of numbers, a lightweight piece.

“It is a lighter celebratory piece but the sum is greater than the parts. When you put those tracks together and weave in various things and ideas it takes it to another place.”

The great challenge was to put together a work which was as good as the songs.

“The power of the Stones is that the music is rooted in blues, a wonderful tradition of American music from the early part of the 20th century, which the songs have at their core and which gives them a weight.

“If you listen to a lot of early recordings, even if they are not making a piece which is obviously a blues piece, that kind of sound – a rawness, very humane about people and emotions on the surface – carries on through the creations.

“It seems to have a depth, a passion.”

No surprise, then, that Little Red Rooster was the starting point.

“If you listen to that song, to its lyrics, it’s about a young guy dressed up to go out. He is very proud of how he looks and absolutely draws an analogy between a guy looking good, his clothes and a preening cockerel.”

The first solo is based on gesture.

“Preening, taking dust from a jacket, straightening a tie, smoothing the hair, pulling your cufflinks – all these images are the root of the dance and you develop those movements. In amongst those is a flapping cockerel, pecking, so you just take these ideas and out of those ideas you create movement and you put it into a dance.”

Rooster has not needed to change over the years because each dancer brings something new to its performance. Bruce compares it to actors taking on roles in a play.

“The voice is different,” he says.

As for the music itself, Bruce has been listening – and dancing – to the Stones since the 1960s.

“It is wonderfully dancable music and I danced to these songs as a young man.

“Listen to the themes and what is quite wonderful is how clearly the male chauvinism in some of the lyrics comes out.

“What it does is it creates imaginary situations, it creates a world, and I try to make that world visual on the stage in all my pieces.

“I try to take the audience to a world I call a private world and try to engage them and submerge them in that place.”

  • Rambert will also perform Sounddance by Merce Cunningham, The Castaways by Barak Marshall and Richard Alston’s short solo Dutiful Ducks