Ballet Superstar Sergei Polunin - What is his problem??

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.

He looks like a psycho and acts like a closet case.

Everything out of his mouth sounds insincere.

Why does Russia breed so many mentally ill people?

Even worse, why is Hollywood rewarding this guy with acting jobs?

This is an old article, he's married to a washed up ice skater now and has a couple of kids. He's supposedly having his tattoos removed, I'm sure he's had lots of trouble finding work in the last few years. He is totally nuts and his dancing has gone downhill, a spectacle who squandered all his opportunities rather than some great artist.

What's with the claw marks on his body?

Are they real? Was he mauled by a Russian bear?

So much talent.

So handsome.

But he's batshit crazy.

Why in the world would anyone get the name "Mickey Rourke" tattoed on their body?

And why in the world would anyone get Putin's face tattooed on their body?

That's the equivalent of tattooing Hitler's face on your body.

Artistic talent is no assurance of intelligence or common sense. He comes off as a crazy contrarian.

[quote]“Let’s slap fat people when you see them. It will help them and encourage them to lose some fat. No respect for laziness!”

This could be the official slogan of Datalounge.

[quote]What's with the claw marks on his body? Are they real? Was he mauled by a Russian bear?

They're real. He was into scarrification. He refers to them as his tiger scratches.

[post redacted because independent.co.uk thinks that links to their ridiculous rag are a bad thing. Somebody might want to tell them how the internet works. Or not. We don't really care. They do suck though. Our advice is that you should not click on the link and whatever you do, don't read their truly terrible articles.]

That's the first thing I thought of when I read that, R9.

He'd fit right in, here at Datalounge.

But you do have to admit, he has a beautiful body.

Gorgeous in motion.

I'd love to see him dance in person.

I would prefer he have a huge floppy soft dick. Perfectly normal there, but he would be HAWF crazy trash if he were horse hung.

ACK R14!!!

Thank you for that!!!

I had no idea he ever went nude on film.

That is a perfectly serviceable cock.

I saw him dance on youtube before I knew anything about him and thought this is really a great dancer(and I rarely think that.) Who the hell is he?

Then unfortunately I found out.

Even before the Putin tattoo, an abundance of tattoos on a ballet dancer is a sign of the crazy, given the number of roles that are shirtless. Self-destructive from way back--bipolar? Such a shame--you don't see that kind of dance talent that often and you really don't see it with that beautiful a body. Baryshnikov was a gorgeous dancer, but short and kind of chunky.

This is old. I wonder what crazy he's into now, what with being a Russian, Putin-loving Ukrainian.

Had he not been so fucked up, he could've been the next in the Nureyev-Baryshnikov lineage.

Awful fellow. Is he still allowed in the US?

[quote]Hozier distanced himself from Polunin, describing his comments as “fucking depressing”.

It's ironic that he's such a massive homophobe when his Dave LaChapelle video dancing to "Take Me to Church" is one of the reasons people know him on an international level. The original Hozier music video is about the insidious destructiveness of homophobia.

Looks like the Sonnenrad. Looks like they got a Nazi dancing Swan Lake.

Serious mental illness there to go with the prodigious talent. He was probably unmedicated bipolar; those are the kind of things they do in their manic phases (and some are baseline-manic pretty much all the time).

Wonder how he's doing these days. Maybe they got him on meds if he's married with kids now.

Why post an old article? Since it was written, he became a father of two, got engaged to the Olympic champion ice dancer Elena Ilinykh, and moved to the U.S., so he is probably a very different person now, even if still twisted.

He grew up in Ukraine, not Russia, r4., although he is ethnically Russian.

My husband is related to a world famous ballet star. That star wanted to dance from childhood. It was an obsession. Same with Nureyev. His father beat him because he didn’t want Nureyev to dance.

Polunin doesn’t seem to have had that drive.

[quote]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.

What is this supposed to mean?

Manic depression is a frustrating mess!

It's bad enough that he has tattoos on his face and hands, but they look VERY cheaply made.

Like he drew on himself with a permanent marker.

Oh, and for a 32 year old he looks worn out.

Try that photo again, at R27.

R13- He doesn’t look particularly heterosexual in that photograph

R29, I'm guessing that could be part of his CRAZY.

Putting Putin on your chest? Writing "Mickey Rourke" in ink on your arm? A tattoo of Heath Ledger's Joker on your shoulder?

That all looks pretty gay to me.

I honestly think he's a closet case who is severely repressing his homosexuality, and it is manifesting itself in self-destructive behavior.

Hot slut.

This guy is the poster child for psychiatric institutions.

[quote] ‘I tell myself: You’re a penis’: Sergei Polunin on drugs, bad tweets – and his Putin chest tattoo

Known as a technically brilliant but erratic dancer, Polunin was the youngest principal at the Royal Ballet, aged 19, but walked out of the company two years later. He made headlines for the 30m YouTube views of his Take Me to Church video, but also for missing shows, for his critical flops, his misguided tweets (from drug chat to homophobia) and his chest tattoo of Vladimir Putin’s face. But in 2019 he met Olympic figure skater Elena Ilinykh, and their son, Mir, was born in January 2020. It’s made him grow up, he concedes. “Kids change us in a positive way, for sure,” he says. “Because you connect to them with energy, you have to be right with yourself. If I get angry, a child feels that energy.” He’s even getting rid of his tattoos as he wants to be “clean”, and is halfway through an agonising two-year process of getting them lasered off.

Polunin is on a more even keel now than he was in his 20s. At the Royal Ballet he felt confined by the institution and craved freedom, but when it came he was overwhelmed by it. “I didn’t know how to answer my emails,” he says. “I had so much opportunity when I left the Royal, American theatres writing to me, movies, agents: I just didn’t know what to do with it. So I kind of locked myself away for six months, waited till everything was gone and went to Russia.”

He felt lost for a while, overindulged in drinking and drugs to escape responsibility. “Dancers are kids,” he says. “You’re well looked after, but you never take responsibility for your own decisions.” He wrote some offensive things on social media. “That’s one regret for sure,” he says. “Part of it was arrogance, it was stupid. I tell myself: ‘You’re a penis.’ In a way it was to destroy what I had,” he says. An act of self-sabotage.

But these days Polunin shoulders a lot of responsibility, producing up to three shows a year. He’s learning as he goes. “In the past we made so many mistakes,” he says. “The first show at Sadler’s Wells we spent so much money. It failed with critics, so you lost the trust of the team, of the sponsors.” But he came back with a second premiere the next year. “You have to come back fast,” he says – or you’ll be soon forgotten. His survival system is based on always going forward. “I have a one-week memory,” he says.

He tries not to think about the financial risk. He never borrows money, and, if they find themselves £10,000 short to pay for a dance floor, he’ll go and do a guest performance to get the funds – his name has global pulling power. Polunin is not short on self-belief but he has a sense of destiny too. His failures could have destroyed him, he says. “But maybe we’re doing the right thing, because we’re still here. If it’s right, the universe will help us get there.”

He's batshit insane and unmedicated. His team - what's left of it - seems to know it.

Sergei is smoking hot.

Is he un cut?

I think he has small man issues. Sites across the internet list him as anywhere between 5'1" to 5'11". His wife is listed as 5'4" so I'd compare the two numbers and make a 5'5" - 5'8" guess, provided he is not wearing shoes that provide him additional height. When there are that many inconsistencies I'm going to bank on the stacked heels and shorter side. Trying to find his real measurements was a futile effort at best. He is a Trump lover. It's bad enough he drools over Putin. Vile.

He’s at least 6 inches taller than his wife.

Sergei's wiki says that he is 5'11.

HOT!

R39 Don't believe all wiki stuff.

R38 In some photos he is that much taller BUT is it a shot where you can see his feet/shoes? No.

R37, Of course, he's a Trump lover--I mean he got that Putin tattoo, how would he not love Trump? And, like a lot of MAGAts, he reeks of insecurity about his masculinity.

Plus, he's just nuts. Beautiful dancer though.

R40, there are full length photos. I tried to link one, but it wouldn’t post.

[quote]Is he un cut?

Based on the photo at R14, he appears to have an uncut cock, yes.

So he's from Kherson, one of the most heavily attacked cities by Russia. I don't believe he has made any kind of statement about the war at all...kind of odd for a guy who used to have so many opinions about everything. His handlers must have him well controlled & medicated these days. It always seemed suspicious to me that he hooked up with Elena so quickly after his famous meltdowns and got her pregnant in a very short time span. A perfect distraction from all the bad PR.

I think she's tremendous.

His problem is easy enough to explain. He's crazy.

[quote]His problem is easy enough to explain. He's crazy.

I don't think it's that simple.

I think that it takes a singular focus in life to be that at something. He's spent his entire life from childhood both dancing and being coddled for dancing, likely at the expense of any real education beyong basic skills. He likely lacks the intellectual competence to make sense of a very complicated world outside dancing.

He's like a child actor who hit it big very early, then implodes.

He's basically Lindsey Lohan.

The 'crazy' is a compilation of all his issues. He was probably indoctrinated by his parents growing up to love Russia and Putin, and to be a homophobic POS. He's gullible beyond belief and too ignorant to see through all the lies he's been fed all his life about Putin. Any man who worships someone simply because he admires evil is someone who is crazy.

Someone on this thread said he's calmed down and is doing better these days? Yeah, no, he just got a new tattoo of Putin. Bitch is as crazy as ever.

"If you are going around being weak, life will destroy you.”

What a nice quote. So true. Don't take shit.

How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?!

In a different universe, I like imagine he and Ezra didn’t become insane twats and are on either side of me providing superb service during one of my legendary orgies lol

His face would stop a clock.....Misha B comparisons are not appropriate.

R37 Baryshnikov is 5' 5", Nureyev was 5' 8", what’s your point?

[quote]Someone on this thread said he's calmed down and is doing better these days? Yeah, no, he just got a new tattoo of Putin. Bitch is as crazy as ever.

Oh lord. And his wife is happy to look at multiple pics of Putin while he fucks her?

I'd like to see him go back to Ukraine showing those off and see how the locals respond. What a piece of shit.

Are there repigs with tattoos of Trump's face? Have yet to see a photo.

[quote]And his wife is happy to look at multiple pics of Putin while he fucks her?

It make me fantasize about time-zone-spanning Putin cock while little dancer inside me!

Baryshnikov has been about as normal as a performing genius can be. In that way he is a lot like Astaire. I feel lucky to have seen him on stage at the height of his powers. Of course he might be a total loon behind the scenes but I think that would have made itself known by now.

He's exhausting.

If he loves Putin so much, and considers himself Russian, why isn't he living in Russia?

He looks and sounds mentally insane. I don't get why people think actors, singers, directors, athletes and performers are highly enlightened individuals. So many of them are quite dumb with no education and very narcissistic and live in their own little world where everyone is just living in it. They're really good at what they do and have knowledge of their craft. But they can lack social skills, common sense, self-awareness and empathy for others who don't benefit them.