WILLIAM Trevitt and Michael Nunn’s dance company BalletBoyz are on the road with theTalent, their showcase for blossoming talents.

The show visits the Grand Opera House, York, on Wednesday with a double bill by British choreographers – Liam Scarlett’s Serpent and Russell Maliphant’s Fallen – that first toured to capacity audiences last year with the company of ten male dancers.

Where once co-founders Trevitt and Nunn were the stars of the BalletBoyzshows, having set up the company after leaving the Royal Ballet, they later sensed they needed to switch the focus to giving new talent the chance to flourish.

“We were beginning to realise that we were getting older and had bigger ambitions about directing and producing as well as dancing, as it’s very difficult to see the full picture from the stage,” says William.

“One way to realise our ambitions was to develop a company of dancers while phasing ourselves out over the years, but that would be frustrating, so instead we decided to put together a company of new young talent, full of potential, and not dancers with 20 years of injuries in them.”

Trevitt and Nunn like to refresh the ranks for their distinctively cheeky shows. “It seems it’s the natural way it works,” says William. “Two of the original dancers are still in theTalent company; one of those is Leon Poulton, who we met at his school in Essex, and he’s ended up not only dancing with us but choreographing and teaching for us.

“The other original is Matt Rees, who was among a group of four young men we saw at a demonstration day for young choreographers and he came up to us and said he’d love to work with us and it went from there.”

Other dancers have left the company to teach or choreograph and the competition to join continues to grow. “Some of the conservatoires go to end-of-term performances at colleges to spot talent but our preference is to hold our own auditions,” says William.

“We’ve had to narrow it down a bit because we now get such an overwhelming response, but we don’t look at their CV at that point. What we’re looking for is someone who’s magnetic. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve trained or not.”

The talent in theTalent will out. “In our company we have ten totally individual dancers. They’re not designed to be a corps de ballet but to be different shapes and sizes, some with better technical skills, some better at improvisation,” says William. “What they do is all contribute to the whole, when there isn’t a lesser or more important dancer.”

• BalletBoyz present the Talent, Grand Opera House, York, Wednesday, 7.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024