Ballet gave runner-turned-dancer Jerome Barnes purpose, strength and the power to defy limits
Jerome Barnes is light on his feet. Ridiculously light.
I had witnessed the British dancer’s fleet-footedness a few days earlier, during the final dress rehearsal for Giselle, in which he dances the part of Albrecht, a philandering, lovestruck nobleman-in-disguise. In it, Barnes, who has been a dancer for almost 20 years, launched off the stage with that spritely, gravity-defying effortlessness that gives ballet audiences precisely that sense of flight we earthbound humans crave.
To help me better understand how a ballet dancer achieves this sensation of uplift, Barnes told me to think of a trampoline, imagine that feeling of effortless effort, as though being thrust into the air by an invisible force, momentarily escaping Earth’s pull.
Then, in the rehearsal studio at Cape Town City Ballet’s headquarters in Rondebosch, he stepped up onto a bench and dropped to the ground, only to instantly rebound, like a spring.
Ballet, he said, is about training the body to convey that spring-like reaction in a way that, by merely watching, we in the audience experience that anti-gravity sensation, which lifts us up, too.
Then, in the middle of the studio, Barnes set up a portable barre and took me through a series of warm-up exercises. They began with very simple foot movements, but pretty soon we were balancing on the balls of our feet, Barnes utterly motionless, as if held aloft by invisible strings, while I teetered, quivered and repeatedly toppled. The concentration alone made me sweat and my feet burn.
He said that, if he had to pick a similar activity, ballet has more in common with mixed martial arts than most sports — that ability to move in, land a punch or a kick or choke out your opponent, and get away quickly. “It’s strength with absolute agility and grace and lightness,” he said. And without the violence, of course.
Barnes was, until a year ago, a principal dancer with Scottish Ballet. He trained at The Royal Ballet School, graduating from White Lodge in 2017.
At 27, though, he says he wants to take advantage of his youth, see the world while he can; as a freelance dancer, he’s trying to avoid becoming stagnant or stuck in one place.
Being stuck is antithetical to who he is. He came to ballet as a runner, something he believes gave him that instinct to always be moving forward.
With Scottish Ballet, he performed in The Scandal at Mayerling, The Nutcracker (“Barnes performs incredible pirouettes as the Nutcracker Prince,” raved one review, “his turbo-charged solo … is nothing short of breathtaking.”), Coppélia and The Snow Queen. In 2021, he won the One Dance Awards’ Rising Star prize.
Barnes had never danced in Giselle, however, until his current stint with Cape Town City Ballet, guesting as part of the company’s Summer Season.
Apart from the full-length romantic ballet, Barnes is also performing in a double-bill that includes a re-imagined staging of Dane Hurst’s Requiem, a piece first choreographed to Mozart’s famed choral mass during the Covid-19 pandemic. It premiered in the UK and drew acclaim for its “surging, scrolling, churning waves of movement”. It’s a work that requires fiercely tight unison dancing by the large cast. If done well, its impact on the audience is profound.
The other half of the double-bill is the Pas de Dix — or “dance of ten” — extracted from Raymonda. It’s one of those hold-your-breath numbers, a rich intermingling of classical ballet with glimmers of influence from folkloric styles such as Polish mazurka and the Hungarian czardas, danced to Alexander Glazunov’s captivating score.
Both pieces are new to Barnes but he’s never shied away from a challenge. Even starting out in ballet meant putting himself out there in a big way. “It wasn’t ‘normal’ for boys to be doing ballet, especially not boys with my skin colour.”
He says when he started looking for role model dancers, the only person he found “who resembled me” was the now-retired Cuban-British dancer Carlos Acosta.
By ballet standards, Barnes started slightly late in life. He was a gifted eight-year-old runner, showed great promise as an athlete, and was told to try ballet to supplement his training. He says what he liked most was that he didn’t feel especially good at it, that he had something to prove.
His ballet teacher thought differently, immediately saw his potential, and had him audition for The Royal Ballet School a couple of weeks after his first class.
Barnes says he had the right mindset to work through the difficulties and decided to give it “a good shout”. “If I accomplish this, I thought, then – wow! – what a story to tell.”
There were advantages from running that fed into his dancing. “As a runner, I had fast-twitch muscle. That helps me with jumping, gives me my natural spring.”
Perhaps more significant was his runner’s mind. “As a dancer, you can overthink a thing because there’re so many ways of doing a step. My runner’s mindset helps me get to the point straight away, makes me want to go, rather than stay stagnant.”
The two passions have fed into one another in other ways, too. These days he runs long-distance crosscountry (and will compete in the London Marathon next month), which helps with his stamina.
“You learn to pace yourself sustainably, build unbeatable stamina. I’ve learnt not to worry that I might burn out because I know I can happily die on the spot and keep going. It helps with the mental battle, with never giving up, not giving in to complacency.”
As much as Barnes has come to ballet with an athlete’s mindset, he says it’s the performance aspect, the chance to disappear into his characters that he loves most, and that he is most completely consumed by. “On stage is when I get to be in a world where I’m no longer myself,” he says. “I become someone else, a character. It’s a fantasy, and I get lost in it, completely gone for the time I’m performing. It’s a total reality shift.”
Then again, altering his reality and changing the course of his own destiny has been a part of his journey since the beginning. Born in Reading, England, Barnes grew up in south-west Surrey, about an hour outside London. He reckons life might have been very different had he not discovered dancing.
“Ballet saved my life. I had a lot of bad influences when I was younger, and I didn’t have my dad in my life, so I was quite a troubled kid. Ballet helped me find the right people.”
He says ballet also helped his family. His three sisters also took up dancing after seeing how much joy it gave him and he says it opened his family up to life’s possibilities. “It opened my mum’s eyes, gave her a sense of purpose in life, too. Me getting into ballet gave my whole family a sort of rebirth, a renewed understanding of what life can be.”
* Part of Cape Town City Ballet’s Summer Season, the double dill comprising Requiem and the Pas de Dix from Raymonda will be performed at Artscape, Cape Town from 21 to 23 March.
