In time, especially with Paul Morrissey, who did the “directing” as Andy dozed, the pictures acquired marginal content – not really story-lines so much as talking points: The Chelsea Girls, Heat, Trash, Flesh, Lonesome Cowboys, Blue Movie. They were called underground movies, but then the underground broke through into the daylight and college kids everywhere were watching Viva and all his other superstars and watching time glide over their skins.Sometimes the movies are as unaffectedly beautiful as great Bonnards; sometimes they are just blissfully boring But movies have never been the same again. Andy was the Last Tycoon (and the lost), as well as the effortless pioneer in the slack art of this new century – surveillance, the miles and miles of coverage of potential trouble spots that keeps us secure, yet insecure. Because what guardian could ever stay awake watching the stuff? In the age of somnambulism, Andy knew that the cinema was the last possible place for peaceful sleep.d.thomson independent.co.ukWarhol film season: Tate Modern, London SW1 (020 7887 8888), to 24 March. William Trevitt, 33, began dancing in Cambridge aged six and joined the Royal Ballet at 18. In 1999, he quit – with fellow dancer Michael Nunn – in a blaze of publicity captured on their Channel 4 video diary, Ballet Boyz. Last year, the pair set up contemporary dance company, George Piper Dances (an amalgamation of their middle names), which has already received a South Bank Show Award nomination.

And as for prejudice? We’ve never come across any, but if you know anyone with an old-fashioned prejudice, bring them along and we will show them what they are missing.Do you think attitudes to dance have changed?I am sure that films like Billy Elliot have helped to make people more comfortable with taking a risk and buying a ticket for dance.Did your friends tease you about dancing as a boy?No, only one of the teachers at my primary school.Will you make a full-length feature film someday?Absolutely. Michael and I are fascinated by TV and film but just for the moment George Piper Dances seems to take all of our time.Do you and Michael ever fall out over artistic differences?Never. One of us is always right and the other knows it.Modern dance has become the sexy sideline to ballet. Do you think classical ballet’s had its day?I think it has lost some of its creative momentum, which is a problem, but it should always be a wonderful period spectacle – if you like that sort of thing.What will you do if one of your sons wants to join the Royal Ballet?Encourage and support him. Oh, and warn him.George Piper Dances is touring the UK until 28 July.

For details, call 020 7637 5505 or visit . La Bayad?

Religious sleaze, blackmail, murder and narcotics are not the first things one expects in a classical ballet, which may be one reason La Bayad? is such a draw after 125 years. From its opening scene of wild, mud-smeared fakirs to the grand nuptials of a Rajah’s daughter, from opium-fuelled visions to a d?uement in which a Buddhist temple collapses, killing everyone on stage, Bayad? has to be the zaniest, most action-packed ballet ever. Set in India, it also has curiosity value for its ludicrously cock-eyed view of the East as imagined by Tsarist Russia. And Natalia Makarova’s 1989 reworking of Petipa’s original is at pains to retain as much of this 19th-century colouring as possible, without ever descending into farce.
Back in the Royal Ballet’s repertory for what seems like the umpteenth time, now with attractive new costumes, the ballet also has value in testing and extending fresh company talent. Bayad? offers three stonking good dramatic roles as well as a crucial contribution from the corps, whose ability to resemble a hall of mirrors is never more severely tested than when they famously descend a moonlit ramp in a single, snaking line of tilting arabesques – an ordeal dancers refer to as “walking the plank”.

Happily, the company has never looked fitter than it does in this revival, and the core trio of principals never better matched.Tamara Rojo as Nikiya, the high-minded temple dancer of the title, may have been a shade off-form technically on opening night (betrayed by the odd stumble, and jumps that never quite took flight), but her dramatic command was undented. Both sensual and spiritual to an almost luminous degree, she made the difficult switch from the bare-bellied exotic of Acts I to the blanched, white-tutu’d spirit of Acts II and III look like jumping off a log. And the abandon she found in the confident hands of Carlos Acosta’s Solor was a joy. He too found depths in a role that’s too often a cardboard hero. It is, after all, pretty shabby to dump your girl for a rich aristo, still more so when you suspect her of murder.