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Why star dancer Sergei Polunin won’t say sorry for his online rants and how he’s going to ‘stop every war in the world’
- Polunin believes that, through art and productions, he can influence collaborations between governments to stop wars
- Though he has regrets over things he has said, he says he is not a person who apologises: ‘I will never apologise.’
Reading Time:5 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Sergei Polunin gets a lot of press.
A few years ago, when the Russian-identifying dancer (he was born in Ukraine) started making headlines, he was being hailed as the “bad boy of ballet”. He was the youngest ever principal dancer to perform with the Royal Ballet, and dance critics spared no superlative – calling him the best living dancer and comparing him to ballet gods like Vaslav Nijinsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Then came the outrage: the breathless coverage of his unhinged, homophobic, fat-shaming social media rants; the lost jobs and career in shambles; the oversized tattoo of Vladimir Putin on his chest; and the swastika on his stomach – said Polunin to Britain’s The Guardian: “The ancient Slavic swastika is one of the nicest symbols if you carry it well. If you do destructive things, like Hitler did, it destroys you.”
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Even when the dust settled, the stories kept coming: the unconvinced profile pieces on the road to image rehabilitation, his choice to strike out on his own, and the subsequent critical panning of his independently produced performances.
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Most recently a new kind of story has emerged, like this one from Dance Magazine, which queasily asks: “Can we please stop talking about Sergei Polunin?”
But here we are.
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