"HE'S pretty amazing. When I was told about the award, I was, like . . . 'What??' And I've taken it off him . . . !"

This young man, this unheralded new figure, was talking about the most famous ballet dancer in Britain right now - Carlos Acosta, the 34-year-old Cuban who is fronting The Royal Ballet, even fluttering hearts on primetime Christmas Day network TV as Romeo, then going home to an abode in a fashionable part of London.

Acosta was the Dancing Times Male Dancer of the Year 2006, as nominated, then elected by the critics. No surprise, and he was merely continuing the unbroken line of predictable winners from the world of ballet, usually the Royal.

"But I don't think he'd have any idea who I was. We don't publicise much in contemporary dance. We're anonymous."

The speaker is his shock successor. The final shatterer of that line. Has something changed? Among the nominees was this 27-year-old from Sussex, and an artistic Hastings family of four, who lives in a flat in Walthamstow, who turns up for class and rehearsal at The Place, near King's Cross. He works hard all week for his dance troupe, learning new, unfamiliar and hot-off-the-brain choreography, then teaches kids dance on Sundays in a local London community.

He is 5ft 9in tall, around 10st, he is Jonathan Goddard of the Richard Alston Dance Company, and he is the first contemporary dancer, man or woman, ever to be named a Dancer of the Year.

Sounds dramatic? "It's just a bit of square plastic with a picture of a dancer on it, on my mantlepiece. The best thing about it is I'm the first contemporary dancer. I've broken through that barrier, of being accepted by the ballet world as an equal in standard to the great ballet stars. That's amazing."

"What will it lead to? "It's a bit unprecedented. Not just to have to keep renting a flat would be nice. Contemporary dance is not well paid. At a certain age you have to give up and say, 'This is a nice hobby but now I'm forced to get a proper job'. So you apply for a Dancer's Resettlement Grant, do a degree and re-train for the normal workplace."

Any offers since the award? "No, it doesn't work like that. It's such a small world. But I'm not a rocket on a mission. If I was I'd look more desperate and a lot less relaxed in my dancing. I just want to work with choreographers I like. I'm interested and really want to get into what I'm doing. And there is always a difference between the kind of dance things I'd like to watch but not actually want to dance."

The showcase - if not the shop window - for Goddard's talent must take immense credit here. He is the longest-serving male dancer with Richard Alston, now in his sixth year, having trained at Rambert from age 16, then spent three years in his first job, from1999, getting a thorough and widely varied working grounding with Janet Smith at Scottish Dance Theatre.

"I went there to work with different choreographers but in the end it was cold, I'd exhausted Dundee and wanted to be back in London. I missed the exhibitions and the shows."

His mother is a dressmaker and an abstract painter inspired by Hastings beach. His father, a jeweller, makes his own experimental music. His sister Mimi Goddard is preparing for her stand-up comedy debut in the Brighton Festival Fringe. "We're all proud of that. In our family, we 'make' all the time. It's about creating."

So why did he choose Richard Alston? "It was really the aesthetic of the dancers and the dances. Every piece of music is interesting and it's the chance to really learn a piece of music, especially one you wouldn't normally listen to. By the time I've done that I go around singing it like a pop song.

"And the kind of dancers with Richard are all soloists in their own right. It's kind of being accepted on my own terms rather than in uniform ones; as an individual. Janet's the same.

"Richard's dances are pleasing to watch. He really likes beauty. You need a grounding in classical as well as contemporary. And we never use scenery and only pared-down lighting. You just see the dancers and you just hear the music."

Reggae is his only self-confessed musical aversion. Beyond his early enthusiasms, he still loves Janet and Michael Jackson ("He's still absolutely brilliant") and jazz. He has a major portion of the dancing Alston calls for in his new work, Shuffle It Right, which uses Hoagy Carmichael's performances of his own songs, Riverboat Shuffle, Georgia, Old Man Harlem and Star Dust.

"I've got loads to do. I've only performed it twice yet, but I love duets. I love dancing with other people."

Alston's Spring 2007 touring repertoire that helped contribute to Goddard's nomination ranged from the modern jazzy Red Run through the 17th century viols of About-Face, to the ragtime of Joplin in The Devil In The Detail. Right up Goddard's street. His first choreographic venture used 1950s jazz.

Do you need a bit of the rebel inside you to take up contemporary dance? That quality stirred in Goddard when, after learning in conventional ballet and drama classes as a boy among plenty of other boys, but unaware of contemporary dance, he had dropped trampolining for dance and now sought college. But all the classical schools he applied for rejected him.

"They all turned me down. I suppose at the time I wasn't that great. They look at your body in the set positions I wasn't very able naturally to get into those positions then. But I've worked my socks off since and I can do them now. I got in at Rambert School because, I suppose, they take a lots of boys. In my year there was a boys-only class, which is unusual."

He intended fervently, therefore, that Rambert's gain was going to be ballet's loss. Even there, his hackles were easily raised: "They start you from scratch but I thought Martha Graham technique was rubbish. You sit on the floor for four or five hours, like yoga. But think they gave me a chance and I really grabbed it. I don't think there was anything special they'd seen in me.

"The auditioning process is very harsh, especially at the ballet schools. They look at your body and assess whether it can adapt to the training. If it finds it difficult, that slows everything down. They want a uniform look. But now my body does anything I want it to."

In 2005 he joined the corps of English National Ballet to dance Romeo And Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall - to overcome an annual problem and fill the summer gap in his Alston contract to keep bread coming onto his Walthamstow table. He can't remember if he was a Montague or a Capulet but Kenneth MacMillan is his top classical choreographer. The ENB were not doing McMillan that time. You can guess he was a little frustrated.

"With MacMillan you get drama, it's quite dark, quite masculine, It's satisfying. Physically, I could do it."

In another world, he was deeply impressed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Narin's Marmoot, in which a small audience sat in a square around the dancers as though in a rehearsal room.

Goddard's favourite Alston work hitherto has been Volumina, of 2005, set to an aggressive, full-on organ score by Georg Ligeti. In it, he and his female partner improvise.

Nashville, unsurprisingly, being a musical Mecca, was his favourite touring city but he underwent a special experience in Portland, Oregon. "I went into a solo, an especially uplifting one, and the audience started whooping and exclaiming in the middle of it. I came off the stage and someone said to me, 'That's maybe the best audience you'll ever dance in front of."

Right now, Jonathan Goddard's growing number of fans - surely set to expand after this award - will wish to prove that person wrong.

Footnotes:

In winning the Dancing Times Best Male Dancer Award, Goddard was preferred to another nomination from the Royal Ballet, the Russian, Kiev-born Ivan Putrov.

Dancer of the Year, Goddard was also nominated for the Society of London Theatre's Laurence Olivier Award, the 2008 Outstanding Achievement in Dance.
He didn't win this time. The prize went the new revival production of George Balanchine's Jewels by (guess who) The Royal Ballet, which also won Best New Dance Production.

Click here for Dancing Times Dance Awards page
Click here for Richard Alston Dance Company

Click here for 2008 Outstanding Achievement in Dance

Richard Alston commented on the recognition Jonathan Goddard has received: "Dancers need to sing with their bodies, and they need physical and technical skill for the fast and creative choreography I do.

"I look for individual quality. Jon was very young and quite raw when he came here and it's been wonderful to see someone grow. I'm very proud of his nomination. The award usually goes to classical ballet, never contemporary.

"Jonathan is what I call an explorer. He works at movement. He's sometimes quite quirky. And it's not always the perfect that I'm interested. It's also the imperfect. He is a very interesting character as a dancer, with an awareness, and then movement of great purity.

"Jon know what he's achieved but he's very much part of the company He's got great humility and and he's a really great company dancer."

And Alston added in the conversation, a titbit for RADC fans: "Among those in our present company, I think Pierre Tappon is a Jon in the making."