“If I am listening to the shy part of my personality, I think I’ll be British and play it all down,” says dancer William Bracewell, with a gentle smile, “but if I am honest, there’s a confidence in me that I’ve never had before. There are moments when I feel I can fully enjoy this.” “This” is being principal at the Royal Ballet , his goal since he first took up dance aged eight at a local class in his native Swansea.
Now 33, Bracewell is the indisputable man of the moment, with his performances in Swan Lake , The Sleeping Beauty and Manon , alongside more contemporary abstract work, all contriving to make him a star. We’re talking future projects in the elegant setting of Baudry Greene, the all-day café in London’s Covent Garden where Bracewell sometimes stops on his way to work. In November, he is set to take on his seventh Wayne McGregor ballet when he stars in MaddAddam , the choreographer’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian sci-fi trilogy about the world after a bio-engineered apocalypse.
It’s certainly a departure from some of Bracewell’s more traditionally romantic fare. “I’m seen as this gentleman, and he is not that,” Bracewell says of his character, Crake, who he describes as being “the mastermind behind destroying the earth”. After studying at the Royal Ballet School, Bracewell joined Birmingham Royal Ballet, where his appetite for hard work and pushing his body to its limit meant that he forced himself to dance on f.
