A knee injury prevented Daniel de Andrade from taking major roles, but his passion for dance remains undimmed, he tells Steve Pratt

BRAZILIAN ballet dancer Daniel de Andrade's reason for settling in Cleveland was a domestic one.

"Family is important. Mine is in Brazil. My children would be orphaned if we were abroad. If we live in Middlesbrough, where my wife comes from, we have the whole of her family around us," he says.

He met his future wife Pamela at the Hammond School of Dancing after winning a scholarship to study in this country. She, too, was a dancer back then, 20 years ago, but didn't pursue it professionally once they started a family. They now have five children - Dale, Lewis, Kieran, Ellise and Madeline. The oldest is 15 and the youngest was one year old this month.

A home in the North-East enables de Andrade to commute to Northern Ballet Theatre's base in Leeds. After a knee injury forced him to stop dancing principal roles, he continues to work with the company as ballet master.

De Andrade trains the dancers and accompanies them on tour, the latest of which brings the production of Dangerous Liaisons to York Theatre Royal on Friday and Saturday.

He's never had any worries about living and working in this country. "I find Britain quite uniform - wherever we go on tour, I pretty much feel at home," he says.

"There are some special cities, like London and Edinburgh, which are fantastic, but generally I'm at home everywhere I go."

He was a late starter as a dancer and the only one in the family, although he describes his father as "a very musical person" and has a sister who's a pianist and a musician brother.

De Andrade was finishing an engineering course at college when he was introduced to the arts. "We had choirs, orchestras, acting and dancing. It was something that captured my imagination," he says. "I had a girlfriend who was a ballet dancer and remember going to see shows her school used to do.

"I started dancing just for the enjoyment. Slowly, it became more serious and I got a scholarship to go to England to finish my studies. The idea of leaving Brazil and going to Europe was very exciting."

He danced with Zurich Ballet and Scottish Ballet, among others, before joining Northern Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer.

"I'd already set myself in the North of England by buying a house there. Having worked in Zurich, I wanted to come back to the UK and Leeds is a closer to Middlesbrough than Glasgow. I was offered a contract with Northern Ballet and thought it would be a great opportunity," he says.

He's reluctant to name his favourite roles because the company performs so much. "I feel if you stay in Northern Ballet for one year, it's like staying in any other company for three years," he says. "I've had the chance to do some great roles - Romeo, Heathcliff, young Scrooge and Jose in Carmen. I'm now teaching some of the roles I played."

After his knee injury, he began assisting new artistic director David Nixon. "I started working on the old repertoire because it was stuff I'd done as a dancer that the company was still performing," he says.

"David was happy for me to do that. Now I'm connected to his choreography as well. We have a very good understanding of each other's work and he's given me the opportunity to stay on in the company."

De Andrade's role as ballet master involves taking the company for daily training and rehearsing them as a group. He goes on tour with the dancers. "My knee is improving, so I'm doing the training myself when I'm not teaching it. Sometimes I go on stage to do the odd little role," he says.

It goes without saying that he misses doing regular dance performances. "The love I have for the dance form is never going to go. The passion is still there," he says.

He'll be in York when the company debuts at the Theatre Royal with its production of Dangerous Liaisons. The show was originally created by Nixon for his company in Ohio. Centred around the wicked sexual games of aristocrats in the years before the French Revolution, the piece was inspired by the novel that formed the basis for the play and the film. Music is by Antonio Vivaldi.

"It gives the opportunity to go to smaller venues because it has a smaller cast and intimate story," says de Andrade.