It is four months since Sergei Polunin used Instagram to destroy his career. And what a job he made of it. When the Royal Ballet’s youngest ever principal dancer praised Vladimir Putin and showed off his chest tattoo of the Russian president, told his male colleagues that they’d better man up and suggested that fat people needed a slap, he pretty much alienated the whole world. In January, the Paris Opera Ballet announced it had fired the Ukrainian, just after announcing it had hired him to play the lead in Swan Lake. The bad boy of ballet lost virtually everything – acting and modelling jobs, a Ted talk, sponsorship.
It was a supreme act of self-sabotage – but by no means his first. This is the man who walked out of the Royal Ballet eight years ago, aged only 21, when he was already being compared to Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Last week, I received an email from Tatiana Tokareva, Polunin’s manager. She asked if we could meet because the dancer “is looking to explain his recent activity on social media”. I told her I know nothing about ballet. That’s good, she said, because Polunin hates talking about ballet.
The next day I climb four steep flights of stairs to arrive breathless at the London attic flat where he is staying. The door is open. Polunin is sitting in a chair, topless, having his photograph taken. I can’t stop staring at his torso. The Putin tattoo takes pride of place, among a series of slash-like scars to left and right, a howling wolf, the Grim Reaper, a circle of swastika-like symbols on his stomach and “I am not a Human” inscribed along his waistline.
“Make yourself feel at home,” he says with a smile. “Would you like something to eat?” He passes me a bag with two fresh croissants inside, and gets straight to the heart of the matter.
“For many years I saw the world as two sides: east and west, two powers. And I was trying to search what is white, what is black. Both sides wanted me,” he says with endearing gravitas. When he was in Russia, he always heard that Britain and the US were bad, and vice versa. He says he believed he could stay neutral, embrace all sides and teach the world to love. At times, Polunin sounds messianic, at others like a lost little boy.
He looks like a punk Baryshnikov. His face is as sculpted as his body, and he has a sweet tattoo on his cheek – a dove and a figure three shaped into a heart. He says this dates back to last September when he stood in Red Square in Moscow and declared he wanted to “unite England, Russia and Ukraine”. (Although he was born and grew up in Ukraine, he has always regarded himself as Russian.) Again, it was all about love. “But nothing happened,” he says. He sounds baffled rather than disappointed.
Fast-forward a couple of months to the night of his 29th birthday, 20 November. He was in Qatar to make a short film, thousands of miles away from home. The film-makers left him alone in the desert for a couple of hours. All he had for company were the stars. When he got back to his hotel, he was still buzzing. That was when he decided to create a manifesto of love, to put out on Instagram. Polunin shows it to me. “Plant or animal, black or white, gay or straight, man or woman, I always see things deeper than just a surface. I always look deep inside the person and you will see a beautiful person in every human being.” But the message refused to send. He thought this was a sign.
Throughout that night, his Instagram followers were sending him birthday love. He wanted to send his own love back in a meaningful way, but the manifesto was obviously not meant to be. So he chose another, shorter message. He had adored Putin since he was a child, regarding him as a heroic strongman. “I thought, maybe I can combine love with this person to say we have to love everybody. I said: ‘All your great wishes you’re sending me for my birthday I’m going to send to Putin’ because ‘I see light when I see him.’”
That’s when the backlash started. “The response was like: ‘Fuck you! We’re going to kill you. This is a dictator.’ And I was like: ‘Oh my God – this is the opposite to what I’d wanted.’” He admits he gets defensive when he is under attack. “Stubborn as I am, I was like: ‘I’m going to carry on doing the same shit.’ So I wrote more and got more hatred.”
By now he had decided love-bombing the world with Putin was not working. So he changed tack. “Instead of thinking art and love can unite, I started to be one-sided and threatening. I said: ‘I’m going to find you, and I know who you are, and you’re going to pay for what you’ve done to my country,’ that sort of thing.” He giggles and blushes bright pink at the memory. Polunin posted on Instagram that he was praying Putin would become “leader of the world” because “it would be ultimate win over evil”.
But he was still keeping his prize Putin secret back. A few days later, he unleashed his chest tattoo on the world. “Thank you to Vladimir and everyone who is standing for good,” he wrote alongside the image. “Then I got even more hate.” Not surprisingly, the Ukrainian government was among those who took offence – particularly after Polunin performed in Crimea, which Putin had annexed in 2014. “Ukraine told me I couldn’t return. They put me on a list of terrorists and war criminals.” Again he blushes and giggles.
Surely he must have received some love from Russia? Well, no, he says. “The Russian administration told me to stop polluting their media space.”
Then something even stranger happened. Polunin found he was enjoying the hostility. “The energy attacks your heart, your stomach, it almost throws you off balance. And it’s amazing to feel it because you feel a connection to the world.” Is it addictive? “Yes, it’s definitely addictive because it makes you feel.” For years, he says, he had felt nothing.
He got a kick from seeing his following falling away, antagonising governments and corporations, losing contracts and friends, wrecking his life. “The only way I knew how to build is to destroy everything and build from scratch. The most amazing feeling in the world is destroying. It takes so much strength and patience and time to build, and destruction is fast, fast, fast. Explosive.”
I’ve met a number of self-destructive artists, but nobody quite so joyous in their recklessness as Polunin. He has always been a controversial figure. At the Royal Ballet he found rehearsals boring, claimed to have performed on cocaine and announced that he wanted to live fast and die young. (James Dean is a hero.) Shortly before he quit, he tweeted: “Does anybody sell heroin?” He laughs about it today. “I thought it was funny. A couple of hours later it was on the BBC news. Everybody thought I was a drug addict. And in one month doing Twitter, I ruined my reputation.”
He also had extraordinary talent. The Guardian’s dance critic, Judith Mackrell, wrote that by the age of 11, his “skinny limbs” were “already shaped by a beautiful line and precocious control”. Just after he quit the Royal Ballet, Mark Monahan wrote in the Telegraph: “In terms of raw ability, he is on a par with Nijinsky, Nureyev and Baryshnikov – except that he’s taller than the last two, and far more beautifully proportioned than Nijinsky.” Most importantly, the critics said he knew how to inhabit a character.
But his relationship with ballet has been ambivalent. He has said he was forced into it by his parents – his mother Galina, in particular, saw it as a way out of their drab, impoverished existence in the port city of Kherson, southern Ukraine. At the age of 13, he won a place at the Royal Ballet School. To support him, his father Vladimir went to work as a builder in Portugal and his grandmother went to Greece to be a carer. Polunin, an only child, dreamed of the day he would return home a star to look after them. He had been in Britain a year when his mother Skyped him to tell him she and his father had separated. He was devastated. “Something broke. I decided I will never cry. I will never be emotional. I won’t care about anything. I became very cold. I was very emotional about everything before. I was very connected to things.”
While dancing made him feel free, he also associated it with pain, boredom and exploitation. He said he had not been given sufficient creative freedom; that “The artist in me was dying … so I pressed the delete button.” The delete button has become a leitmotif for Polunin.
In the intervening eight years he has rebuilt his career a number of times and, inevitably, pressed that delete button again. He went to Russia, where he was an unknown, won a national talent competition, became a superstar and walked away. In 2015, he danced in a video for the Hozier song Take Me to Church. It was perfect Polunin territory – tender, tortured, ecstatic – and introduced him to a new audience. He was a star again. This time, not just in ballet, but in the movies, too. Kenneth Branagh cast him in Murder on the Orient Express; he played opposite Jennifer Lawrence in Red Sparrow. 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. By this January he had wrecked his future in eastern Europe with his Putin posts, but the rest of the world hadn’t taken much notice. He loved the feeling all that vilification gave him and wanted more of it. So now he started letting rip in increasingly eccentric English. “Man up to all men who is doing ballet there is already ballerina on stage don’t need to be two. Man should be a man and woman should be a woman … That’s a reason you got balls. Same think Outside ballet, Man what’s wrong with you? Females now trying take on the man role because you don’t fuck them and because you are an embarrassment.” He said that men needed to act like lions and wolves and deserved a slapping for being effeminate.
He insists that it was only when he turned his attention to overweight people (“Let’s slap fat people when you see them. It will help them and encourage them to lose some fat. No respect for laziness!”) that Paris Opera Ballet dropped him. Last week, Hozier distanced himself from Polunin, describing his comments as “fucking depressing”.
I ask Polunin if he meant what he said in his rants. “Yes. I don’t see any male energy presenting us in ballet. 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. “Like sex changes – giving children the opportunity to change sex, men wearing lipstick on TV! What values are you teaching people?” Even when he rants, he does so quietly, with an apologetic smile.
Polunin insists his point about masculine energy has nothing to do with sexual orientation. “Somebody like Brando is my hero. 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. if you are going around being weak, life will destroy you.”
Was he talking about sex when he said men had to be like lions and wolves? “Yes. It’s common knowledge that if man has sex with a woman she’s happy, and she’s not going to be happy if you don’t have sex with her. And what is crazy now with the #MeToo movement is man is now scared to flirt with women.”
Does he have sex like a lion/ wolf? He blushes again, and almost whispers his answer. “No, I believe in single love and I don’t believe in sex as mechanical. It’s spiritual.” Polunin, who used to go out with the Russian dancer Natalia Osipova, is currently single.
Well, that’s good, I say. We’ve cleared up one thing: it’s all about male energy rather than homophobia. He pauses. “For me it is not natural to watch it.” Watch what? “If two men kiss, I’m like [he makes a noise as if his stomach is churning] because it is not natural to me.” Just when you think you’re getting a grip on Polunin, he blindsides you. Even now, it’s hard to know for sure whether he means it.
He admits there is one thing he did say purely for effect. “When I said about fat people. I never saw people as fat or skinny. It’s something a friend of mine says, and I found it funny. As soon as I did this thing about fat people, people were like: ‘Right, this is enough.’ It crossed the line. ‘This is violence against people!’”
It didn’t matter to him that everybody was walking out on him – he was having too good a time. “Even my friends were saying: ‘I’m going to stop working with you.’ Everybody had left by then. Big companies, big agencies, film agencies, advertising company. I had to return all the money.” How much? “Not crazy – about £100,000. Still, it was good I wasn’t sued.”
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. “It was like I could almost see time. I was flying, flying, flying, and then it was like, boom! I was like, fuck, the energy’s gone. 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. “I wanted to talk about stopping all the wars, stopping all the negativity we have. But what I was doing was pissing people off and putting people against each other.”
Does he regret what happened? He looks at me as if I’ve lost the plot. 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 thought it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever been through. I learned how society worked, who is loyal to me, who is not. What is important to me, what is not.” His Instagram apocalypse has liberated him, he says. “I feel the freest person since then. I see other people sleepwalking, and I’m totally awake looking at everybody and have regained the joy.”
I’ve been with him for three hours. Throughout, he has been charming and attentive – even if some of his views have been outrageous. As I leave, I ask him about the tattoo on his stomach. “Ah, that’s a kolovrat. In Germany, they say I’m a fascist for having it. But the ancient Slavik swastika is one of the nicest symbols if you carry it well. If you do destructive things, like Hitler did, it destroys you. I really want to change this horrible thing about this beautiful light symbol.” I tell him he is fighting a losing battle on that front. He laughs, but Polunin being Polunin, it has probably just made him even more determined to popularise the swastika.
For now, though, he is looking forward to all the rebuilding that lies ahead. He is focused on creativity – meditation, painting, choreographing, producing. He has even got a few dancing gigs that have survived the scandal – playing the title role in the ballet Spartacus in Munich, and shows at the Palladium in London. He may even treat himself to a new tattoo. “I want to write ‘Save and protect’ across my shoulders.”
It’s a nice idea, but it may be a little late for that.
Sergei Polunin dances in a mixed programme at the London Palladium from 28 May to 1 June, poluninink.com