Sergei Polunin tells us why his bad boys days are behind him

[S]ergei Polunin, the media’s purported “Bad Boy of Ballet”, doesn’t seem so bad at all. We’re sipping water in the velvet-clad anonymity of a private member’s club in Soho, and the critically acclaimed dancer is telling me how he feels about interviews. “It’s important to speak if you have a message,” he says softly, “but if you don’t, I’m not so sure. I do them mainly for Project Polunin. If it were just for myself, I probably would have stopped.”

It’s not an entirely surprising sentiment. In 2012, amidst much drama, Sergei – then 21 – quit The Royal Ballet after just two years as its youngest ever principal dancer, and the media coverage was brutal. “They did burn me,” he says with a smile. “I got tricked in interviews and they’d pull something out of me that I didn’t want to say. Then I started playing with them, and stopped even believing what I was saying… At the time it was fun, but I can see now I was kind of digging my own hole.

He’s dug his way clear out now though. After some years spent simultaneously publicly battling personal demons and searching to reclaim his space in the dance world, the 27-year-old performer has settled into his own – tattoo covered – skin. “You go through experimental times when you don’t know what’s happening and it’s a difficult time but it’s also an interesting one. You get into the unknown but then you come out knowing something, and you create the path. That time was the most lost in my life – it’s like a haze. But most people go through that at that age, and then [as you get older] things start to connect.”

Much of Sergei’s battle is played out in the Steven Cantor documentary, Dancer. The 2016 release charts his rise and fall, from his early days growing up in post-Soviet Ukraine, to his move to London, his departure from the Royal Ballet, and his subsequent projects (including an unmentionable stint on Russia’s equivalent of So You Think You Can Dance, and a tumultuous year working with the celebrated Russian artistic director Igor Zelensky). Of all of these projects, however, it was the 2015 video for Hozier’s “Take Me To Church”, directed by David LaChapelle, that turned Sergei into a household name. It’s a deeply moving, extraordinary, harrowing solo performance, and if you haven’t watched it I suggest you go and do that right now.

In Dancer Sergei suggests that ballet was chosen for him by his mother, and even goes as far as to say that he sometimes wished he would get injured, so that he wouldn’t have to dance anymore. How do you feel about ballet now, I ask? “Good, but what I said was true at the time. You go through stages – it’s a love/hate relationship. I’ve re-connected with it now though, and I’m at the stage where I’m building to be the best I can possibly be. I’m getting it back.”

This is in part through Project Polunin, the company launched by the dancer last year with the aim of bringing together dancers, artists, musicians, and choreographers from varied creative backgrounds to collaborate on dance works for stage and film. Their first offering was shown at Sadler’s Wells in March to somewhat unfavourable reviews, but they will be returning in December at the Coliseum. “I have another chance to come back and do it right this time,” he says. He won’t reveal any details, aside from “there will be a lot of new things” and that he plans on “doing it properly”. He talks of his goals – which include bringing good quality dance to the public and ensuring that his dancers are supported and nurtured – but Sergei is driven more by experience than outcome. “As long as I am having interesting experiences I am happy,” he says, “knowing it’s about that makes me not stressed about things.”

One of these experiences is acting, and Sergei will make his on-screen debut in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express this November. “I use ballet as a platform for acting,” he explains. “I use the same approach, but with a transformation of scale. I transform the movement from dance – which is a big movement – into something much smaller, so that your face becomes a stage. Any thought, any little movement is your stage.” By the same admission, his work in fashion – most notably for Italian brand Pal Zileri – was never about fashion. “For me fashion just gave me the opportunity to learn how to be comfortable with the camera to be an actor.” Next year he will feature in thriller Red Sparrow, alongside Jennifer Lawrence, as well as in Ralph Fiennes’ The White Crow, which tells the true story of Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West, in which he plays fellow dancer Yuri Soloviev.

Although Sergei is political, and thinks it’s “important to be involved in a good way”, he doesn’t vote. “I’ve never even thought to. I think things are decided on a different level. I don’t think we decide anything with voting, only the small things.” He believes, instead, in the “soft political power” of the arts. “Artists are probably the most important people on the planet – they’re the ones that create the reality we are living in. Driving a car, artists creates it, wearing clothes, artist makes it, flying a rocket, artist designs it, your phone even, it’s by an artist. Art is very, very powerful. I think it’s one of the most important political powers because it opens something good in people.” His suggestion is that before big political meetings – at the EU and UN – the attendees watch an art performance of some sort. “My position is that I want to unite, and dance can do that. I meet politicians and powerful people on different sides, they can fight against each other, but I know them and they are good people. I don’t believe there is any good or evil – I think if you put people in the right direction of thinking that can open something good. Everywhere there are similarities and the same people – take aggression away and penetrate people with good feelings and love.”

Part of this approach appears to stem from his spiritual beliefs, on which Sergei speaks softly, thoughtfully, and philosophically. “For a big part of my life I believed in religion,” he says. “Now I am spiritual, definitely. I believe in something – energies – I don’t know what it is. I believe in life, in following the universe and the signs we need to get to that higher state of consciousness. We need to go there.” He loves yoga, and says that will be his form of movement when his body gives up and he can no longer dance. But for now his body is fine – “it’s just the breathing, you feel like you’re dying from not having enough oxygen.” Pain is something Sergei likes to steer clear of, which is why he hasn’t had any new tattoos in a few years (last count was roughly 17): “I don’t want to go through the pain! I’m not done, but the pain stops me.” I tell him there is an entire YouTube video dedicated to his tattoos and he laughs. “Actually just yesterday I was thinking about how there’s this whole world going on,” he says. “ I don’t know.” What about the label “Bad Boy of Ballet”? “It’s weird,” he sighs. “The name is stupid I think. But whatever… I don’t identify myself with it, but it’s stuck and is impossible to get rid of.”

Sergei is a self-proclaimed over-thinker: “But that’s just to work out the puzzle of how to connect things and how to make them right. You have to think think think and then things will reveal themselves.” And he likes to act at the same rapid pace. “There’s no point in wasting time. My heart is always open, I feel it straight away and I’m ready to go! Sometimes it takes people longer to get used to things and they’re like – time has to pass and I’m like no, why? Why does time have to pass, let’s do it straight away! But sometimes time does need to pass, so you have to find a good balance.”

Balance is definitely something he seems to have found. Although he can’t currently call anywhere “home” – “I like living out of a suitcase, it’s like living different lives,” – he is, significantly, happy. “It used to be that I felt the most alive when I was dancing, that I only felt normal when I was dancing and I felt lost the rest of the time – I’d be like, who I am? So I found myself, which is good. Now I feel alive a lot of the time, so dance is just a plus.” Does he feel like he’s lived a lot of lives, I ask. “Not a lot but one definitely. And I feel like times goes really slow. People are like – “I met you a year ago” and I feel like it was 20 years at least.

Sergei doesn’t regret or resent playing out his struggles in the public eye. “It’s important to show. In this culture everybody is hiding everything. People think, ‘Oh there is a perfect world’ and it gives you the wrong vision of life. And it makes you think that your life is not good. But everybody has the same problems, you know?” This was his intention with Dancer. “I wanted to show that every country has life – across the world from Russia to the UK to Africa it’s all the same. Everyone connects in a different way, with their own experience, but it’s just about showing what life is, because lots of people don’t talk about what life is and in school nobody talks about what life is. [Nowadays] everything is to do with distraction – TV, games, phone – from life and from reality.”

“Anybody can be anything and anybody they want to be, if they just listen to themselves. The problem is that after school people stop believing in themselves and start to get jobs and families and then that’s it, life has passed. Straight away you have to be the way you want to be, and if you fail then at least you tried to do something that you believed in.”

Interview taken from Hunger issue 13, Mad World, out now

Murder on the Orient Express is out now