gramilano

In today’s Sunday Times, Adam Cooper - ex-Royal Bal­let dan­cer, and cur­rently tip-tapping in the West End — talked about the places where he and his elder brother, Simon, grew up. Until their teens they lived in a ‘poky’ flat in Tooting.

The flat was much too small for two ener­getic boys with a musi­cian father who had instru­ments, key­boards and sheet music every­where. Music was so much part of our lives. We used to sing in choirs when we were seven and eight years old.

But when he was thir­teen the fam­ily moved to a house in Nor­bury. Just as well since the grow­ing boys had star­ted to dance:

Sud­denly, I had lots of space, which gave me the oppor­tun­ity to make up routines for us. I cre­ated dif­fer­ent cho­reo­graphy and spent hours mim­ick­ing Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. They were our idols when we were grow­ing up. We were also into Michael Jack­son and Prince. We learnt most of their routines. I was usu­ally Michael and Simon was Prince.

His father’s pas­sion for music was contagious:

I had a record player in my room. Simon had a TV. I listened to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascend­ing, the soundtrack from Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet or Bach violin con­cer­tos. Through the walls, I could hear that Simon was next door, glued to the TV.

By the time he was six­teen his Madonna posters had given way to images of his bal­let idols:

My bed­room became a shrine to the dan­cers who were my her­oes — Anthony Dow­ell, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Bary­sh­nikov. I added lots of dan­cers from the Kirov, too, because that year I was lucky enough, as a stu­dent, to spend a sum­mer with them at the Royal Opera House.

Adam Cooper is cur­rently star­ring in Singin’ in the Rain at the Palace Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.