16-year-old pivots from a Kenyan slum to the ballet stage

NAIROBI, KENYA >> In a country not usually associated with classical ballet, a 16-year-old dancer leaps onto the stage, his gravity-defying turns taking the audience’s breath away.

Joel Kioko is arguably Kenya’s most promising young ballet dancer. Currently training in the United States, he has come home for Christmas — and is dancing a solo in a Nairobi production of “The Nutcracker” while he’s here.

“He’s the real deal,” said Dance Centre Kenya’s artistic director, Cooper Rust. “I’m pushing him to go for the stars. Paris Opera, Royal Ballet, here we come! Even if Joel ends up in a more regional company, it will be incredible.”

Kioko grew up in Nairobi’s Kuwinda slum and took his first dance class five years ago in a public school classroom, with bare walls, no barre and no mirror, the desks and chairs pushed outside.

Now he’s teaching holiday classes to aspiring dancers in Kibera, the Kenyan capital’s biggest slum.

“I don’t know what I could have done without ballet, without dancing,” Kioko said. “I don’t even know if I could have been existing, it’s weird to say, but dance, it’s everything to me.”

His encounter with ballet happened by chance when he was 11. He was discovered by a fellow dance student who at age 14 was teaching a class at his school and told her teacher, Rust, about him.