Adam Blyde

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT WOMEN

Ballet dancer Adam Blyde is 25 and lives in Glasgow. He is currently single.
MY MUM is amazing in every respect, so as predictable as it sounds, she is the most important woman in my life. She was incredible when I was growing up, a source of constant support. I went to boarding school to do ballet when I was 11 and I really missed her. At times all I wanted was to come home.

She told me that I could do whatever I wanted to do career-wise and that she’d always support me. That was a great thing to hear. After all, when your son tells you that he wants to be a ballet dancer it’s not exactly conventional. Now she’s my biggest fan and she comes to see everything I’m in, of course. It’s great to know that I have her unwavering support. That’s what mums are for, I suppose.

Romeo is a dream part and quite funny really. I don’t know how much we’ve got in common. This Romeo is very romantic, a pacifist, very gentle. I think that most women would love to take him home. He’s great to play and luckily I also get on very well with my Juliet.

I love working with women, which is good because I meet so many of them professionally. I’ve grown up working with women constantly, so they’ve never been that much of a mystery to me. I have loads of female friends through ballet. You become very close very fast in this environment, where you’re working together so intimately and having to get to know each other quickly.

I never tire of women’s company. I find that women talk a lot more than men and they’re usually much more open. They’re in touch with their feelings and they know how to express them; although, at the same time, they sometimes expect you to be a mind reader. It’s impossible to know exactly what they’re feeling – they often hold something back.

At the end of the day, we’re not all that different. I think that a group of women behaves pretty much the same as a group of men, they just don’t like to show it. I do find that in ballet women are much more competitive with each other than men are. We all want certain roles, but women can be very determined!

I’d actually quite like to be a woman for just one day. I think I’d like to be a very beautiful woman. It would be interesting to know what that feels like. I’d like to know if people treat you differently or compliment you all the time. I’d probably go on a date so that I could have my chair pulled out for me and the bill paid. It would be nice to see what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that sort of treatment. Lots of fun, I imagine.

I think that a lot of men are a little bit jealous of what I do. They see it as a sort of dream job, because I get to work closely with so many beautiful women and dance with them on stage. No-one’s ever made any sort of lewd comment about the lifting involved in ballet, but it can be quite amusing when you’re getting extremely close on stage and have to remember that she’s happily married in real life.

• Adam Blyde dances Romeo in Scottish Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre 13-17 May. Call 0131-662 1112 or visit www.eft.co.uk for details.