At the feet of a great seducer
For years Adam Cooper wanted to stage Liasons Dangeruses. Now he's finally done it. By Debra Craine for The Times:


AFTER every performance in Japan it was the same. An excited crowd of female admirers gathered outside the stage door hoping to meet the tall handsome Englishman. And Adam Cooper, the 33-year-old dancer and erstwhile swan, was only too happy to oblige.

Not only did the performer in him appreciate the adulation, the choreographer within was most grateful. Because thanks to Japan, and more specifically Japanese television, Cooper has been able to realise a long-held ambition to stage his own version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.

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The shock of the cruel
Adam Cooper has put away his tap shoes to dance the dastardly Vicomte de Valmont, says Clifford Bishop for The sunday Times


They used to say of Cary Grant that every woman wanted to have him, and every man wanted to be him. Well, Adam Cooper has gone one better. It seems that everyone who sees him perform wants to have him, or be him, or both. Once dubbed “the sexiest man in ballet”, Cooper is the David Beckham of dance. Stylish, golden, versatile (and that’s just the hair), he radiates an indiscriminate eroticism that goes beyond mere ambivalence and becomes, frankly, inhuman.

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Not just anybody: Sarah Wildor, 33
How the fit and fabulous stay that way. Dancer Sarah Wildor stays on her toes with scalding hot baths and relaxes with a glass of red. INTERVIEW BY ANNA SHEPARD for The Times.


You’re starring in the dance production of the erotic thriller Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Is ballet getting sexier?

Relationships and passion have always been well suited to body language, but people are becoming freer in how they use it.

This production is a good example. I wouldn’t call it straight ballet, it’s really a piece of theatre using dance. It shows how different avenues are being explored, taking dance away from its classical routes.

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Getting personal - Frock coats, cravats and breeches: just take me back to the 18th century
Interview by Carolyn Asome for The Times


ADAM COOPER, was born in London 33 years ago. He began tap-dancing at the age of 5 and ballet at 7. He moved to the Royal Ballet school at 16 and in 1994 was made principal dancer, performing opposite Darcey Bussell and Sylvie Guillem. He appeared in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. He lives in Hampshire.


What’s in your bathroom cupboard?

Nivea shaving foam, Paul Smith aftershave, Clinique face and body scrubs, eye-cream and aftershave balm.

Name your desert-island essentials.

Well, my wife would be an essential. I’d also take a yoga mat.

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Pas de deux
It may be the hottest Dangerous Liaisons ever: the two lead dancers are husband and wife. Judith Mackrell reports for The Guardian.


'There's no embarrassment in the more passionate pas de deux' ... Adam Cooper and Sarah Wildor

Adam Cooper and Sarah Wildor aren't shy to admit they fell in love under torrid circumstances. They were in Sicily with the Royal Ballet, at the height of summer, and had been called in to understudy Rudolf and Mary Vetsera, the inflammatory, deviant lovers at the core of MacMillan's dark tragedy Mayerling. "That was the first time we felt a spark between us," says Cooper. At the time, Wildor was with someone else. "But it was really hot," she giggles. "And so were we. We were definitely on heat."

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The libertines
Its publication caused a scandal and it has seduced generations. As Les Liaisons Dangereuses becomes a ballet, Jason Cowley in The Observer looks at its many incarnations.


'I resolved to write a book that would be quite outside the ordinary trend, which would make a sensation and echo over the world after I left it," Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos wrote of his first and only novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Published in April 1782, Les Liaisons was an immediate sensation, a succès de scandale. Yet later it would be banned in France, and denounced - despite its own insistent morality - as immoral; it would not be translated into English until the 1920s when it was celebrated by, among others, Virginia Woolf.

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Preview: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sadler's Wells, London
A dance to the music of scandal. By Michael Church for The Independent


Choderlos de Laclos's great epistolary novel was a succes de scandale when it first appeared in 1782, and it's been pleasurably scandalizing readers - and audiences - ever since. Those of us with long memories remember the French actor Gerard Philipe in Roger Vadim's film, not to mention John Malkovich in Stephen Frears's film, and Alan Rickman as the roué in the Royal Shakespeare Company production.

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Ismene Brown meets the stars of the new Liaisons ballet
From The Daily Telegraph


It's some poster they've got up around Sadler's Wells and at railway stations - Adam Cooper, bare-chested with long bed-hair and a curl of the lip to make both sexes faint.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses is the show, and the dancer who had most of the world fainting over his hypnotic starring performance in Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake now turns his aptitude for smouldering towards a French dastard named the Vicomte of Valmont. You may remember the 1988 Stephen Frears film, Dangerous Liaisons.

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Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. I saw the show last night at Sadlers Wells. To give an indication as to just how good it was, the only fault I could find was that Adam Cooper was breathing rather heavily when he was supposed to be dead! the spooky sound effects and the echoing voices give just the right amount of eeriness where needed, and the cast did an amazing job, I was totally absorbed in the performance the whole time.
Definitely one I'd like to see again. It's something that everyone should see.

Thanks for that Alex. I've been wondering whether to fit "Les Liaisons" into my schedule for the coming week and I've spoken to a couple of people who were not enthusiastic. So it's good to hear some very positive comments.

No problem. If you do see the show be sure to let us know what you thought of it!

Who needs small talk?
Hysteria blights Adam Cooper's stylised version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, says Jann Parry in The Observer


Adam Cooper has devised a modern masque in his version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, co-produced with designer Lez Brotherston. The immoral tale, based on Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel, is told through stylised dance, song and descriptive music. Philip Feeney's score combines baroque pastiche with up-to-date sound effects.

Characters are introduced in full-face masks, their silken finery covered by cloaks. This is to be a dance of death, led by two libertines: the Marquise de Merteuil (Sarah Barron) and her accomplice, the Vicomte Valmont (Cooper).

They challenge each other to a campaign of seduction, predators out to destroy for their own satisfaction. In the novel, their duplicity is revealed through letters; the problem for a choreographer is to explain who the victims are and why they've been chosen.

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Fall from grace
Adam Cooper’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses shows flashes of inspiration, but fails to live up to previous incarnations, says David Dougill for The Sunday Times:


Sexy Adam Cooper’s seductive eyes and — not to put too fine a point on it — nipples hit you full in the face from the posters for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, his new dance-drama production, now running at Sadler’s Wells, following its creation in Tokyo earlier this year.
At the start, it looks like being fascinating, as masked figures in black, carrying candelabra, pull aside drifty curtains to reveal the latest marvellous set by the genius designer Lez Brotherston (also co-conceiver and co-director of the piece). This is a huge, mirrored room, like a mini-Versailles.

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