‘If you slip, it hurts your soul’: the ballerina who asked a sports psychologist for coaching

Huge audiences and even larger livestreams are putting a whole new type of pressure on dancers. Yasmine Naghdi, principal of the Royal Ballet, tells us how Britt Tajet-Foxell fixed more than just her fouettes

Earlier this year, Yasmine Naghdi was struggling in the rehearsal studio. Naghdi is one of the Royal Ballet's leading dancers and her performance of Swan Lake would be livestreamed into cinemas around the world. But although known for her crystalline technique, she became almost too anxious to nail her solo.

Naghdi seems enviably poised today: back straight, eyes shining beneath strongly etched brows. But the impending show literally threw her off balance, she explains. Performing Swan Lake to 3,000 people [in the Royal Opera House] is stressful in itself but this would be filmed and streamed live to cinemas globally, with the prospect of being on stream thereafter - that's the version of me that remains out there. So everything has to be perfect. That's a huge amount of pressure."