Initially, the ballet world seemed resistant and reviews were mixed. As soon as I did that, everybody keeps you out. I understood. Two years later, in , Polunin self-destructed again, when he made a series of outrageous and offensive comments, including fat-shaming and homophobic slurs on Instagram. I probe him for signs of contrition. He argues that he believes comments in which people revoke their social media views are empty. People, for some reason, need that. He says he has no problem apologising to people directly.
He arrives not so much as the rebel, more as the new establishment — although there are still the many infamous tattoos to mark him out: Vladimir Putin on his chest, swastika-like symbols on his stomach and, on his face, a bird flying towards his left eye.
Soon, he tells me, they will be no more. To me now, they are childish. The change came when he had a son early last year, with the Russian ice-skater Elena Ilinykh. The tattoos no longer reflect the persona he is trying to present to the world.
When his body was first inked, it was a mark of rebellion. Having them removed is an excruciatingly painful process. He was a star again. This time, not just in ballet, but in the movies, too. He started a foundation for young dancers, and Paris Opera Ballet invited him to play the prince in Swan Lake. Which brings us back to today. He loved the feeling all that vilification gave him and wanted more of it.
So now he started letting rip in increasingly eccentric English. It will help them and encourage them to lose some fat. No respect for laziness! I ask Polunin if he meant what he said in his rants. I see lots of pictures of males wearing pointe shoes and this is disgusting because you cannot flatten female and male energy because they are two different things. Why are you lifting your legs like girls? What are you doing? Be a man. He says he sees this gender flattening in everyday life — and again he disapproves.
What values are you teaching people? Polunin insists his point about masculine energy has nothing to do with sexual orientation. Brando is the manliest man there is. He was bisexual. Nureyev had male energy, Freddie Mercury. Even Elton John has male energy. They are not weak. Was he talking about sex when he said men had to be like lions and wolves? And what is crazy now with the MeToo movement is man is now scared to flirt with women.
He blushes again, and almost whispers his answer. He pauses. He admits there is one thing he did say purely for effect. I never saw people as fat or skinny. Big companies, big agencies, film agencies, advertising company. I had to return all the money. Then on 20 February, three months to the day after the start of his Instagram carnage, Polunin came crashing down.
It was another out-of-body experience. I was flying, flying, flying, and then it was like, boom! And I instantly deleted everything on my Instagram. I started to realise how stupid everything was. He remembered how it had all started with his ambition to unite the world in love. But what I was doing was pissing people off and putting people against each other. Does he regret what happened? Of course not, he says — he never regrets anything.
His manager Tokareva talks about what happened to him as a form of breakdown. But Polunin pooh-poohs that. No, he says, it was a revelation, an epiphany. I learned how society worked, who is loyal to me, who is not. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission. In my head, there was a minefield of highly explosive subjects to be tip-toed around in my hour-long exchange with the notorious Bad Boy of Ballet, Sergei Polunin.
But, bad stuff out of the way — many would argue that the year-old new father is one of the best dancers to have walked the earth. A part of the gilded roster of Nuryevs and Baryshnikovs of this world. And in his — unfailing — capacity to disarm, the interview was amongst the most candid I have ever carried out and, remarkably, without a floating PR primed ready to intervene should the conversation take a detour from his upcoming autobiography, Free: A Life in Images and Words.
View Iframe URL. Fleetingly in London, to collect his visa card, Polunin is Zooming me from a room belonging to a friend it was in April ahead of hospitality opening up. A few minutes late for the interview, he appears on my screen, his dark, haunting tendrils of hair framing his distinctively sharp cheekbones. Later pages show him appearing as the face of global fashion campaigns working with the likes of David LaChapelle and Rankin.
A flick through is a reminder of all that he has achieved as a dancer — and just how far he has come from Kherson, a small and dispiriting town in southern Ukraine.
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