FACING Marie McCluskey’s desk is a poster etched roughly in marker pen with the words ‘Swindon Dance, A place where ordinary people achieve extraordinary things through dance.’ A smidgen to the left a sheet pinned to her noticeboard declares: ‘Young people’s access to the arts shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be a prerogative.’

These dictums have guided the founder of Swindon Dance since her very first students filed into the ramshackle Town Hall studios 36 years ago.

“I believe that anybody can dance and move – creativity is trained out of you, not into you,” says the 68-year-old on the eve of her retirement as Swindon Dance artistic director. “It was just about offering ordinary people opportunities to become extraordinary dancers and nurturing their talent.”

Marie’s life can be summed up in a series of chance encounters, lucky happenstance and – though she may object ferociously - tireless work, unflagging devotion and commitment to dance.

Raised on a council estate in South Oxhey near Watford, Marie, a self-confessed “tomboy”, was dragged kicking and screaming to ballet lessons at the age of two. Before long her mother gave up entirely on coaxing her to dance classes.

It was not until one of her friends performed a tap routine in patent red shoes at their Brownies Christmas show that she decided to give dance a second chance at the age of 10.

“It was the red tap shoes that caught my eye,” she smiles. “It took a while to convince my mum I really wanted to do it again.”

In her mid-teens she was offered a scholarship to study ballet at Arts Educational in London. In 1966, during her training, she received another grant to take classes with a pioneering new school emulating the work of Martha Graham’s contemporary dance company in New York. The avant-garde troupe led by Robert Cohan and veritable epicentre of the modern movement in the UK would become the critically acclaimed London Contemporary Dance School.

“I was headed for a classical career but contemporary just captured my soul,” recalls Marie.

With only three ballet companies recruiting professional dancers in the entire country in the late 1960s, jobs were scarce and Marie struggled to find steady work. She married, had two children -Milou and Eddie - and launched her own dance school in the capital.

The exorbitant London house market prompted her and husband David Nixon to move to Swindon where once again she offered dance classes at the Holy Family School.

“We had never even been to Swindon but we didn’t think twice about it,” she shakes her head in disbelief. “I remember when I first came I asked someone where the tubes were. I had never lived in a place with no tubes. We were just up for doing new things, taking risks.”

She was 29 when, in 1977, she spotted a notice outside Thamesdown Council offices seeking artists to take part in a pioneering project spearheaded arts officer Terry Court. The plan was to turn the tired venue into an artistic hub where musicians, dancers, a whole coterie of artists would be given the freedom to experiment and create unhindered.

“I never planned to be a teacher but I got drawn into it really,” she says. “When I saw the notice I had been teaching for seven years, my children were a little older and I thought I’d like to do some choreography and be more creative. We started running this company called Changes there. We thought that dancing needed changing and we wanted to do something different. It snowballed. I can’t believe they let us do the things we did. We were risk-takers and entrepreneurial. We put on little shows and had classes and they started being more and more popular. We did things that weren’t done outside of London.”

After 18 months of blissful experimentation, the council received funding from the Arts Council for a dance coordinator. Peeved to be asked to apply for the same job she had been doing unpaid for near on two years, she interviewed for a better remunerated role in Leicester. She was offered both posts – Swindon’s was paid half the wages. She “listened to her guts”, turned down the Leicester job and took a chance.

In 1979, Thamesdown Contemporary Dance Studio was born at the Town Hall.

It was renamed Swindon Dance in 1998 when the local authority became Swindon Council.

Over the years Swindon Dance has stood at the forefront of contemporary dance nipping at the heels of innovative companies in London. It was one of the first studios to teach hip hop and street dance in 1984, a time when so much as trying out the moves out on the street would draw unwanted attention from the police.

“I never had ambition,” she says without a hint of false modesty. “I just reacted; I did what needed doing next.

“When the Travolta dance boom happened and dancing suddenly became cool for men, we had ordinary people coming in off the streets and we developed ways of teaching young people who started dance a bit later. We had to have our own approach to dance and that was unique then. It was the same with hip hop and street dance.”

Among its many guises, the charitable trust runs a Youth Dance Academy - one of just nine Centres for Advanced Training in the UK funded by the Government – to nurture and encourage young dancers. Swindon Dance was also one of the first establishments in the country to spearhead an access and support programme, offering former students and young dancers across the country a space to rehearse and put on performances and grants to tour their productions.

“The hardest part is what you do when you’ve trained, you look for a job and you don’t have the money or connections to survive,” adds Marie who was awarded an MBE for her services to dance in 1992. “Our students kept coming back to us saying, ‘I have a company, can we do a piece here?’ or ‘Can we use the space?’ We were driven to give them that support, to find ways to develop their career.”

Swindon Dance gave a young Matthew Bourne, now an award-winning choreographer and MBE a studio to perform his first three professional shows. Marie and her team were instrumental in supporting acclaimed choreographer Russell Maliphant in the early days of his career. Former student Adrienne Hart and founder of Neon Dance was also backed financially by Swindon Dance to grow her company. She still regularly uses to the Town Hall studios for rehearsals.

“When you graduate you feel a bit lost and Swindon has been this anchor point for me and I think it is for a lot of people,” says Adrienne, a graduate of the London Contemporary Dance School. “Marie offered me some studio space and as my ambitions have grown she’s matched that. What makes Swindon Dance unique is that Marie listens to artists. She doesn’t dictate anything. She says ‘How can I help?’

Scottish dancer and choreographer John Ross was also invited to develop his latest work, Blink, at the Town Hall rent-free.

“Swindon Dance have helped me with studio space and given me a chance to create work for me not just for performance to see where my strengths lie – it’s all part of the creative process,” says John, who was one of 32 BBC Ones to Watch Fellows for 2015. “They’ve gone out on a limb for me and trust me to deliver without any pressure.”

Alumni include Thomasin Gülgeç, who later trained at the Rambert School and joined the Rambert Dance Company , Carys Staton who is a member of the award-winning Russell Maliphant Company and BBC Young Dancer 2015 Jacob O’Connell.

After single-handedly (although she begs to differ, crediting the council for its unflagging support in an area where commitment to the arts was not supposed to happen) putting Swindon on the map as a breeding ground for up-and- coming dancers, Marie will be taking a bow as Swindon Dance artistic director on January 29. Her successor will be announced at a later stage.

“I’ve been doing it for 36 years and it was time to move over,” she smiles. “When I think of what it was like for me as a woman with no money and from an ordinary background: running your own company and having the financial support to do what I wanted to do was not possible. You didn’t have that access and support. The world has shifted so much. Now we’ve put a real structure in place in England and people can just about have a career in dance outside of London. It’s exciting for me to have been a part of it. When you see the places it has taken dancers and where they work now – it’s been quite extraordinary. It’s a happy-sad time. It’s like having children, you have to let them go and stand on their own two feet.”