Danny Boyle should make a movie about the new chair of Dance UK. It would be more dramatic than Slum Dog Millionaire, with the added thrill of being true.

Farooq Chaudhry, the dancer turned business brain behind the phenomenal success of the Akram Khan Company, was born in Lahore in 1960 and was three when his parents brought him to live in West Kensington. “We came into a very white culture in London that was intensely racist, and we experienced huge amounts of discrimination” he recalls. “It had a terrible effect my family, it damaged my parents’ relationship and they split up. At 14 I ended up in care”.

And there, as in countless millions of cases, the story would have ended, an unremarkable tragedy, had it not been for an enlightened social worker who perceived a spark in the misfit adolescent. While his elder sister Mighat went back to Pakistan, he was sent to Peper Harow, a psycho-therapeutic community in Surrey for troubled young people.

“There was no formal education – I didn’t take that up till I was 19 – and I was basically self-taught” he says. At 21 he went to Sussex University to read English, but joined the dance society and after his first session went to the dean and announced he was leaving. He was going to be a dancer. “The dean was very kind. He gave me a year and said if I still wanted to leave then I could”.

Where the urge to dance came from is a mystery. His family home had been a culture-free environment, yet his sister became a renowned classical kathak dancer in Pakistan and is now influential there in cultural politics.

Chaudhry’s teacher back at Peper Harow suggested a visit to the London Contemporary Dance Theatre performing at Sadler’s Wells. “I saw amazing male dancers looking like gods, and it was love at first sight. I was mesmerised by it, I had to do it - but where could I find a contemporary dance teacher in Godalming?”

He devised an elaborate plan, creating his own dance society at Sussex for which members paid a fee, and with this he hired teachers from places like Pineapple and The Place. Whereas the club he had joined had 20 members at its fullest, in two months he had 400 members. “In six months the Observer Magazine credited as being the moist successful dance union in the country, and the wealthiest” he says. “It all came out of desire – I was dancing and at same time creating a scheme. I discovered I’m very entrepreneurial”.

In 1983 he got into The Place and joined a small group there called Images. “But there was no-one to manage it, so I volunteered, made it up as I went along, and started to raise money. I got it out of IBM, Digital, Reebok and I was inundated with offers to be administrator. But I wanted to be a dancer”.

He applied to join Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s renowned Rosas in Belgium and at the third try got in, aged 34. “I learned not only about being a dancer in a company but also to work out what was happening, the dynamic of relationships in organisatons”. He was Keersmaeker’s assistant for a year “and I began to understand the challenges, the issues and problems”.

But injuries were starting to set in, and in 1998 – by now married to Su-Man Hsu, a Taiwanese dancer – he enrolled for an arts management MA course at City, commuting from Brussels by Eurostar. “I didn’t enjoy it very much – it seemed very heretical because you disengage from practice, and there’s a tendency to idealise and romanticise the arts as some kind of social saviour, but it’s an industry”.

He joined IndepenDance, a new Arts Council sponsored agency for ex-dancers who wanted to be managers. “It was very protectionist, and it was weird working with people who has been professional for 20 or 30 years and were highly respected, but had become very cautious. But I’m an ambitious person, I like to dream, and I was frustrated, I wanted to go bigger”.

He saw a performance by the dancer Akram Khan. “I thought, wow! I liked this new language that was being spoken by bodies, a beautiful spiritual quality that comes with Asiatic aesthetics.

“Most classical/contemporary dance is monocultural, and when you get an artists able to speak more than one language in his work it’s really interesting” he says of Khan. “We spoke and there was an immediate chemistry between us - he found me as much as I found him. We both had a desire to go somewhere, I’d been offered work by various companies but wanted to grow with an artist”. He became Khan’s producer.

But Akram Khan was already £14,000 in debt, and somehow Chaudhry cleared it. He sent Khan to Keersmaeker for six months training in international techniques, and he returned brimming with ideas for a new piece. But he wanted three dancers, commissioned lighting, commissioned choreography, and Chaudhry sold his flat to pay for it.

That was Rush, which announced Akram Khan as the first cross-cultural, cross-art form choreographer, and soon he was working with Anish Kapoor, Nitin Sawhney, and even Kylie Minogue. Last year he collaborated with the National Ballet of China and the French actor Juliette Binoche on In-I. “My wife is a masseuse now and Juliette is a client of hers. She happened to mention that she’d always wanted to dance, and Su-Man said she should talk to Akram…”

Akram Khan’s rise has coincided with a revolution in dance in this country, partly led by Chaudhry’s predecessor as chair of Dance UK for five years, Alistair Spalding, chief executive of Sadler’s Wells. “People like Alistair are programming much more adventurously, productions are much better made, the quality of collaborators people are pulling in is much higher, and that means we’ve got a greater richness to the work and we’re drawing on a wider spectrum for audiences” says Chaudhry. “Dance UK has come in on that and created a wonderful momentum”.

But in taking over from Spalding he has walked into a series of challenges, the principal one being the dancers’ health pilot programme which he believes is essential for the future well-being of performers, but which was turned down for a £40,000 lottery grant by the Arts Council just before Christmas. “I will have failed if I don’t find the money to make this project a reality” he says.

Next will be to continue to engage politicians and ameliorate the effects of cuts promised by all parties after the election – “We have created this momentum with spectacular statistics - audiences up and dance all over the television - and it would be tragic if the head of this momentum is cut off because people are worried about the country’s debt”.

He is working towards a dance summit for 2012, not so much to thrash issues out as to establish a forum where creators can meet and talk. Dance UK could also start training programmes to help dancers into new careers after their performance life is over. “In how many professions could you start all over again at 40? I did, and it’s been fantastic.”

Dance still has a long way to go, and get help the rest of the arts sector with its challenges. “One of the problems for dance is people with lack of commitment, discipline and business acumen. How do you make it work in artistic framework? I believe that we need to be more perceptive, we need to be sharp, we need to know who we are. We need to know what people want when they don’t know they want it yet” he says.

“Dancers can be the best the best entrepreneurs and business people, but they’ve always got to be some way ahead of what’s happening.”