Controversial twenty seven year old Sergei Vladimirovich Polunin is a Ukrainian ballet dancer who was formerly a principal dancer with the British Royal Ballet and is currently a principal dancer with the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre and the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre.
Polunin continues to be one of the most sought-after male principals in the ballet world for his rare combination of charisma, athletic grace and authority.
Steven Cantor’s intimate and revealing biography documents his life and examines the emotional and physical sacrifices of Polunin and his family in order for Polunin to achieve success.
Was Polunin’s success worth so much sacrifice?! Members of his close family were forced to immigrate separately to different parts of Europe to pay for his education, which saw him gain a place in the prestigious Royal Ballet School. While his father frantically worked in Portugal , his mother was a hardy Ballet Mother, devoted to her son. His parents ended up painfully divorcing, after which he didn’t see his father for six years.
\We follow Polunin from his childhood in Kherson ,a bleak provincial, economically depressed city in Ukraine to his performing on the most famous ballet stages in London and Moscow and achieving comparisons with Nureyev and Baryshnikov.
Polunin became the youngest Principal dancer ever with the Royal Ballet at the age of nineteen. Yet we also see how Polunin’s ambition slid towards great disenchantment and he spiraled towards burnout and self destruction, which led to behavior that earned him a reputation as ballet’s ‘bad boy ‘ climaxing with his sudden shock departure from the Royal Ballet which created headlines around the world in 2012.
We follow Polunin in early home videos depicting a lithe, elegantly graceful young boy and then the teenage prodigy through to the dynamic, charismatic tattooed star of the David LaChapelle directed “Take Me to Church” with music by Hozier. a video that went viral last year. We are treated to the full length version of this music video.
Music by Black Sabbath haunts another section where we see Polunin taking pills and possibly some sort of liquid amphetamine.
We also follow Polunin in rehearsal, in his dressing room and in performance as well as seeing him goofing around with his friends.
The film features a selection of great interviews, including some classmates from the Royal Ballet who have remained friends, his first dance teacher Galina Ivanova, and interviews with his parents and grandparents.
The film sees Polunin articulate his guilt about the sacrifices his family made for him, which he expresses with searing honesty.
DANCER ends with him performing a Jerome Robbins concert, with his family watching, and then the emotional reunions afterwards in the dressing room.
I found it interesting that the film made no mention of his intimate relationship with that other ballet mega star Natalia Osipova. ( (They performed together again at Sadlers Wells in October).
The film’s rather optimistic ending perhaps points to a new part of Polunin’s life where he may have now found a way to find the balance between family and career.
We now await the next moves in his life.
DANCER is in English, Russian and Ukrainian, with English subtitles.
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