Back to black: Phoenix Dance resurrects the race issue

How many times can Phoenix reinvent itself before it lies dead in the ashes? Since its founding in 1983 the Leeds-based company has been through at least half a dozen artistic directors, and just as many changes of identity - from being an all-black, all-male troupe, to a company of mixed race and gender, and finally (to most people's relief) to a company in which colour and sex were no longer an issue.

Now the news has broken that Phoenix has undergone yet another convulsion, with the sacking of its current director and resident choreographer Javier de Frutos.

As Phoenix' s choreographer, De Frutos was always going to attract controversy. Even though some of his creations for the company have been highly acclaimed, others - like the hair-raisingly violent Los Picadoros - have sharply divided critical and public opinion. But as a director De Frutos had put some indisputably smart strategies in place. After his highly successful revivals of modern dance classics by Jane Dudley and Limon, he was deep into planning a revival of the fabulously strange early Paul Taylor classic 3 Epitaphs plus a newly commissioned work from golden boy Christopher Wheeldon.

All this was establishing Phoenix as one of Britain's most interesting and entertaining dance companies. And not only that, De Frutos was putting Phoenix on the international map with extensive foreign tours plus a recent headlining appearance at the Venice Biennale.

All in all, an impressive two years. Yet none of this seems to have impressed Phoenix's board. Aside from the absurd fact that according to De Frutos one member apparently found his works a "bit poofy", and the more practical concern that the more ambitious and costly of his plans were making the board jittery, the main reason De Frutos was given for his removal was that under his direction Phoenix had ceased to be a sufficiently "black" company. Even though De Frutos is himself Venezuelan and the rest of his company are a completely representative, urban, ethnic mix, Leeds seem to want to put back the clock to the time when Phoenix was a "flagship" black company.

No one would deny that black talent in this country still needs encouraging. There are shockingly few black dancers in our ballet companies and even in modern dance black dancers and choreographers remain under-represented. But if it's true that Leeds want Phoenix to revert to an all-black company, or even one with a conscious policy of favouring black dancers, that can't be the answer. The board only need to look back though the company's history to see why. Every time Phoenix has tried to make that formula stick, the level of its choreography, and even of its performances has floundered. The company starts to look provincial in the worst possible ways. It starts to look like a company that's all about the social policy, not about the art.