Ruffling Some Feathers
When Adam Cooper broke his foot and was unable to dance his role of the Swan in Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake,” it was his brother Simon who stepped into his feathered shorts for three weeks of the hit London run.
Until then, most people didn’t know that the 26-year-old ex-Royal Ballet star had a brother, let alone one who danced.
Simon, 27, took a leave from Rambert Dance Company to tackle the celebrated part, but it was in spite of a lifelong loathing of fraternal comparisons.
“I nearly didn’t do it,” says Simon, his dark brown hair cropped close, wearing a scant beard, black jeans and a wool pullover. He was sitting on a couch in the conference room of Rambert’s studios in southwest London, not far from where he grew up, a day before leaving for the company’s first tour of Southern California in 16 years.
The comparisons were inevitable, but critics were impressed. Said the Independent: “[Simon] shares with his sibling a magnificent leap and a cultivated sense of animal savageness but has even more impressive muscular control of what one can only call his enormous wingspan.”
It was in the third act, in which the Swan turns into an ominous gate-crashing stranger, that Simon distinguished himself most fully in the role. “Coming on stage . . . with an ugly-mug smirk in the Act 3 leather-clad party,” said one critic in the Independent, “he scared the lights out of me.”
“I can go out on stage and be nasty and get that aggression out,” Simon explains. “When I did ‘Swan Lake,’ I was really nasty toward women, I thought I was It, I could just click my fingers and someone would come. Of course, it’s definitely not like that in real life.”
His younger brother--who taught Simon the steps while hobbling around on crutches--admits he stole a few Swan pointers from Simon: “He taught me a lot about the role, because his natural way of dancing it was far different to mine,” Adam Cooper said by telephone from his home in London. “A lot of the things he did I really loved, and I put them in in L.A.”
Rambert’s three-part run in Southern California will be the occasion of Simon Cooper’s Los Angeles dancing debut--he appears in two of the pieces they will dance at three venues--but it almost happened with the Swan. A contractual technicality prevented Simon from dancing the role part time during its L.A. run at the Ahmanson Theatre last spring. The idea was to grant Adam his wish to play the Prince--and to create yet another psychological twist in the tortured Swan-Prince relationship that Bourne’s version focuses on. And while they deny rumors of dual Cooper casting when “Swan Lake” opens on Broadway next fall, the brothers both indicate that they would like to dance together in the future.
Nevertheless, Simon turned down a subsequent offer to dance in last season’s “Cinderella,” which also starred his brother and will probably be performed in Los Angeles next year.
“I would’ve been on stage with Adam,” Simon says, “and I didn’t want that comparison.”
The worst of the rivalry between the Cooper brothers began and ended when they both attended the Royal Ballet Upper School as teenagers, but it still haunts their now-close relationship. Brian and Jean Cooper had encouraged their sons to sing and play music. But it was when they were 5 and 6 that they developed a simultaneous fascination with tap-dancing. From that moment on, they were constantly in the same classes, competing for the same roles.
“Between 13 and 17 or 18, we didn’t get along at all because there was that competition,” says Simon. Adam was taller, more naturally confident and outgoing and seemed to have better luck. After school, Adam joined the Royal Ballet, and Simon, who was turned down, joined the English National Ballet, where he stayed for five years.
Despite the initial disappointment, Simon says now, not getting into the Royal was a blessing in disguise. The English National Ballet gave him a chance to experiment with a range of styles, and it gave the brothers some needed professional distance.
Simon admits that it was hard to watch his brother rise quickly at the Royal to principal dancer, while he languished in the corps at the National. But, he says, “as you grow up, you tend to relax a bit more, take things with a . . . pinch of salt . . . because . . ,” he says, “life’s too short.”
Does he really believe that? “I don’t know, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?” he says, laughing at himself.
It was at the English National Ballet that Simon met Christopher Bruce, a guest choreographer who cast him in “Swansong,” which Simon is slated to dance tonight at Pepperdine’s Smothers Theatre. In 1994, when Bruce took over as artistic director at Rambert, London’s oldest dance company, Simon followed him. The move, everyone agrees, has been the best thing that ever happened to Simon.
“Simon is very shy, very self-effacing, he never sings his own praises,” Bruce says. “He has lived a little bit under the shadow of his brother, but Simon is easily [his brother’s] equal. Adam might have a finer gentle quality as a classical dancer, but Simon’s ability to range from classical to contemporary work is amazing.”
Adam also demurs at the notion that he’s the more successful brother: “[Simon] might say that. The work I’m doing now is commercial. It goes out to a larger audience. At the moment he isn’t getting the same exposure that I am.”
But the spotlight will be turned on Simon next fall, when he dances a leading role in Bruce’s 1977 “Cruel Garden,” at the new Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Based on a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca about a symbolic bullfight between a bull and a poet, Simon is playing--surprise--the bull.
“He instantly understood the role,” Bruce says. “He’s very animal and powerful in his movements.”
“I love powerful things,” agrees Simon, who played soccer and practiced martial arts throughout school and is an ardent boxing fan. “Actually I like violent things as well. Everyone thinks if you’re a dancer, you must be gay or effeminate if you wear tights. I wanted to get as far away from that as possible.”
When he performs tonight in “Swansong,” a piece in which a political prisoner is tortured, Simon will not wear tights. And it’s not hard to guess which part he’ll be playing.
“I could never be a victim,” Simon says, grinning. And why’s that? “Because I tower over most of the other people. It might not look so believable, somebody trying to push me around.”
BE THERE
Rambert Dance Company, tonight at 8, Smothers Theatre, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, $30, (310) 456-4522; Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Veterans Wadsworth Theatre, Wilshire and San Vicente, Brentwood, $10-$35, (310) 825-2101; and March 13, 8 p.m., March 14, 2 and 8 p.m., and March 15, 2 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $10-$35, (714) 556-ARTS.