IT’S always good to catch up with talented Canberrans making good on the world stage, but few are quite as loyal to the old home town as dancer Paul Knobloch.

For the last few years, even though working full-time with the Bejart Ballet in Lausanne, Switzerland, and now with Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet in San Francisco,   Knobloch regularly returns to Canberra to see his family and to teach at his alma mater, the Canberra Dance Development Centre in Spence, where he’s taking master classes until August 5.

Yesterday, I caught up with him as he was putting some young ballerinas (and a few little boys) through their paces. Although Knobloch rarely teaches during his busy life in San Francisco, where he moved six months ago, he was taking his young charges through their paces easily as they limbered up for their annual dance show “Treasure.”

Mind you, as CDDC director Jackie Hallahan told me, they were already quite disciplined so easily followed his instructions, handed out with lots of laughter and cheerfulness.

During a break, Knobloch told me he’d had no regrets about his move early this year from Lausanne to San Francisco, arguing that “America is the centre of the international dance world”. He hopes eventually to return to Australia, where he’ll start his own company, so the contacts he’s making in the US bring him closer to that.

In addition, in recent years he has been plagued with an arthritic condition in his feet which he shrugs off as “something that we dancers face” but which has increasingly caused pain, so the move from classical to contemporary dance has been advantageous.

Of course, as he says, “I miss the ‘Nutcrackers’ and the ‘Swan Lakes’, but this is easier on my feet, though it’s demanding on the rest of me.”

And he’s been busy. When he arrived earlier this year he had only three weeks to learn King’s full-length ballet “Scheherazade” before performing in New York where, as he says, “the exposure was really good”.

You can say that again. One New York critic wrote: “The fabric slowly rises to reveal Paul Knobloch, the lights highlighting his rippling muscles and blond hair. He was Apollo, God of manly beauty”. He can handle that kind of praise and doesn’t even mind the back-hander from another New York critic, who wrote “Knobloch… seems to have arrived from another planet; his style doesn’t blend with the others. But questions of style are almost beside the point”.

It’s expensive in San Francisco, but he’s hardly drawn breath in the first six months as he learnt all the new dances, so hasn’t been tempted by the usual distractions.

“I’ve learnt eight ballets since I’ve been there,” he says, including Alonzo King’s “Scheherazade”, “Resin”, “Migration”, “Refraction”, “The Moroccan Project”, “Rasa” and “Dust and Light”.

On his return to San Francisco, he will take part in Lines Ballet’s collaboration with visual artist Jim Campbell, currently exhibiting at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.

Then there was the Lines Ballet’s recent whirlwind tour of the European summer dance festivals, so fast that his old friends from Bejart had to communicate by leaving him a note and a bottle of champagne. Mind you, he did find himself rubbing shoulders with people from the celebrated Nederlands DansTheater and the Forsythe Company.

Describing life as a ballet dancer as “blood, sweat and tears,” he says, “it really hurt learning all those ballets – in my brain, inside, I was breaking down”.

Canberra Dance Development Centre presents “Treasure”, inspired by Mother Teresa’s poem “Life Is”, Canberra Theatre, 7.30pm, Saturday, August 25, bookings to 6275 2700 or www.canberratheatrecentre.com.au