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The New Yorker Culture Desk

What happened when Galina Polunina finally saw her son dance.

Sergei’s dance mom

Dance moms… as a breed, we ballet mothers can be insufferable—clingy, controlling, and omnipresent. The mother of Margot Fonteyn, who was known as the Black Queen.  She trailed after the ballerina, even on company tours abroad, acting as a composite of a personal assistant, lady’s maid, and nineteenth-century chaperone. Many of us are failed dancers living vicariously through our talented offspring.  Looking back, I find something embarrassingly “Black Swan”-like in the way I drew satisfaction from my son thriving at the Royal Ballet School—the very place where I’d felt so miserably inadequate.

Sergei’s dance mom, Galina Polunina, though, saw ballet primarily as an escape, an opportunity for her only child, to achieve a brighter existence than her own. “In my life, the choices were between salted cabbage and marinated cabbage,” she said. “I wanted him to have more of a choice than that.”

Sergei today

Today, Sergei Polunin is renowned throughout the world for the four-minute solo he performed to Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”  The dance video of raw, erotic force went viral on YouTube, and forms the climax of “Dancer,” a new documentary about Polunin. In fact, its hectic acrobatics don’t do him justice. Polunin is an outstanding classical dancer—probably the purest virtuoso since Mikhail Baryshnikov—and brings a cinematic subtlety to his dramatic roles. The smudged lines and head-clutchings of the Hozier piece give little sense of this, although in its strange, swaying opening you can feel the power of Polunin in repose.

Peacock among pigeons

I got to know Sergei when he was thirteen and already a legend to his fellow-pupils at White Lodge, the Royal Ballet’s junior school. Watching him in end-of-year displays was like seeing a magnificent strutting peacock among a straggle of urban pigeons.  He was so perfectly formed and technically astounding that his teachers had moved him ahead by two school years. He’d started dancing at the age of three, when Galina first took him to classes in their Ukrainian home town of Kherson. As he grew older, his parents, believing that he stood more chance of success as a professional sportsman, enrolled him in gymnastics.

From the age of four, Sergei trained after school until he dropped with exhaustion.  There was no kicking a football about with friends or fun of any kind. After Sergei had recovered from a long spell of pneumonia, Galina decided to give ballet lessons another try, and when he turned nine she entered him for the Kiev State Choreographic School, which accepted him at first sight.

Sergei’s “Billy Elliot” moment

The school’s boarding facilities were so rough that Galina felt she had no option but to move to Kiev herself to make a home for Sergei. Galina’s husband, Vladimir, and her mother both left Ukraine and worked abroad to fund his training.  The four-year separation inevitably took its toll on the Polunins’ marriage. For Sergei, the knowledge that he was responsible for the family’s breakup was hard to bear.  Even harder was the constant pressure to fulfill his remarkable talent. Galina began preparing Sergei for a brilliant future.  She entered him in ballet competitions and rebuked him for not taking his dancing more seriously.

She accompanied him to London for an audition at the Royal Ballet School, and afterward suffered a “Billy Elliot” moment of despair when the acceptance letter arrived, knowing the family could never afford the fees. The Rudolf Nureyev Foundation later agreed to subsidize Sergei’s schooling. Losing him to London was Galina’s greatest sacrifice.  She fell into a long depression before beginning a new life for herself as wardrobe mistress at Kiev’s National Opera.

Royal adventure

For Sergei, however, after four years living in a single room with an exacting mother, the Royal Ballet School, housed in a stately hunting lodge on two thousand acres of parkland, was an exhilarating adventure. Determined to meet his family’s hopes, Sergei was a model pupil at White Lodge.  Once, however, at the senior school he began to kick against its regimental confines. He experimented with club drugs when he joined the company. Later, finding himself unchallenged, having already soared to the top of his profession.  He began using cocaine to heighten the adrenaline rush of performing.

Then, in 2012, he made what he called a “big boom” in the world press by quitting the Royal Ballet. Appointed its youngest ever principal at the age of nineteen, he’d been fast-tracked through the ranks, given too many major roles too quickly, and by twenty-one felt burnt out. He told me at the time that it seemed he had nothing left to prove.  He realized that his lack of a real vocation for ballet owed to the fact that he’d been forced into it as a child. It had been his mother’s choice, not his.

Sergei’s mom kept up with him on the internet, like the rest of us

I visited Galina in her studio apartment in the outskirts of Kiev in 2012.   I was working on a long profile of Sergei. His tweets about his late, druggy nights, and the press excitement about his new tattoos and his escapades in North London’s underworld, had frightened her.  She craved reassurance that the online rumpus was mostly hearsay.

Despite the language barrier, Galina and I bonded immediately, perhaps because of my own brief experience as a ballet mother. I’d done my own share of pushing, arranging a Russian tutor for my youngest son, Alfie—he also had conversation sessions at White Lodge with Sergei—in case he ever studied at Vaganova Academy, in St. Petersburg. This never happened; he decided he wanted to go to “a normal school,” and I’ve never been allowed to forget that the Russian lessons, which he dropped as soon as he could, were all my idea.

“I vowed I’d arrange for her to see him dance”

But an adolescent’s raised finger to parental influence was nothing in comparison to what Sergei put Galina through. They had kept in regular touch and vacationed together during his summer trips to Ukraine.  Now he dissuaded her from attending the students’ graduation concert at the Royal Opera House, in London.  He was the star, and all but forbidden her to watch his Royal Ballet performances.  Galina was forced to follow his progress online. Video clips can’t capture the glow of his presence onstage, and I vowed that somehow I’d arrange for her to see him dance.

“All is good”

A year later, an opportunity came up. I’d begun work on a documentary about Sergei with my husband, the dance filmmaker Ross MacGibbon. There was already a wonderful visual narrative, as in typical dance mom fashion, Galina had photographed and filmed all the key moments of Sergei’s early life.  We decided to shoot the first footage in London, in February of 2013. The Royal Ballet was reviving the Fonteyn/Rudolf Nureyev vehicle “Marguerite and Armand” to mark the ballerina Tamara Rojo’s farewell season with the company, and the director had invited Sergei back to be her partner.

After sending Galina an invitation to help secure a visa, I presented her London trip to Sergei as something of a fait accompli. I’d acted on impulse—mostly out of empathy with Galina—but I readied my excuse to Sergei.  If we got permission to film his mother watching him for the first time on the Royal Opera House stage, it would be a powerful moment in the documentary. He didn’t protest at the time, but told me later that he’d tried to talk Galina out of coming. “I felt so connected to her that I thought I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the role,” Sergei recently recalled. “All I would be thinking is ‘She is there.’”

February 10th, 7:50 a.m.: “I am start fly, love Galina.”

1:07 p.m.: “Where are you now?”

“Now in the train! All is good!”

Galina in London

I met Galina at Victoria Station, and took her to a small, chintzy hotel I’d booked nearby, on Ebury Street, leaving her to rest. Sergei had told her that it was warm in London, but the weather had turned foul, with sleet and freezing wind, so later we went together to buy a pair of boots. That evening, I picked her up at seven and drove to our flat, where I’d prepared dinner for her and Sergei. She hadn’t been able to contact him yet, and neither had I, our calls going straight to voice mail. At 8:30, we were still unsure if he was going to arrive, but finally I got through to him. He was in a taxi with his friend, the Royal Ballet’s Nehemiah Kish, a soft-spoken American dancer whose loyalty is much valued by Sergei.

More than one dance mom

Dinner was a little awkward at first.  Sergei hardly spoke to Galina, who was quiet and couldn’t join in the English chatter. I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake. Male stars with absent mothers are a magnet to devoted, middle-aged fixers—Nureyev had surrogate stage mothers in every city he frequented.  I hated the thought that I’d become one of those meddling obsessives. Sergei was already nervous about returning to the company he’d abandoned.  He seemed to think that having Galina there might jinx his performance.  In challenging this, I was responsible for stressing him out even more. But then the mood loosened up. The baftas, which were on television, helped to break the ice.  The dancers drank several beers and tucked into second helpings of venison. All three stayed late.

Rojo kisses Galina’s hand

“Marguerite and Armand,” which was performed the next night, was the last ballet on the bill.  When the curtain rose Galina clutched my arm for a second. Sergei told me afterward that with his very first step he’d thought about his mother being there. “If I’d screwed up or fallen, I’d have blamed it on her,” he said. But his performance was flawless—blazing, bestial, tender, and beautifully in tune with Tamara Rojo, a superb dramatic ballerina. Galina sat straight upright throughout, dabbing her eyes with a napkin that she’d taken from the bar. At the end, the entire auditorium was hushed (“I thought, What’s going on?” Sergei said), but when the curtain rose again there was a collective roar.

Then the house manager arrived to escort us through the pass door onto the stage, with our film crew following behind. A stylist acquaintance had lent Galina a chic black dress and feathered cape.  When Sergei caught site of her, he took hold of her hand.  They talked in Russian about her designer outfit until he realized they were being filmed. Rojo came over to hug Galina.   She thanked her for “making such an amazing dancer and letting him come to London.”  Then, in a balletic act of homage, she knelt and kissed Galina’s hand.

“I want to make her happy”

Galina went to see “Marguerite and Armand” again during her trip.  She and Sergei had a dinner by themselves. Later in the week, we took her to a local restaurant.  She had a giggling fit when my langoustines arrived with a lemon half-wrapped in muslin. She put it in her bag as a souvenir. We saw matinees of “Mamma Mia” and “Billy Elliot.”  Galina was delighted.  After a couple of days she was as independent as a Londoner. On her return, she carried a stash of demerara sugar in her suitcase (“It costs six times more in Ukraine”).   Galina paid the hotel bill with a brick of banknotes that Sergei had given her. This was the first of many trips. “It was time to stop being selfish,” he told me. “I want to make her happy.”

First of many performances

Sergei was then under contract to the Stanislavsky company, in Moscow.  Director Georgian dancer Igor Zelensky, was a former principal with the Mariinsky and the New York City Ballet.  Other major companies shied away from signing a dancer then regarded as a volatile troublemaker.  Zelensky stepped in.  Galina said he “saved” her son. He created a Polunin repertory, featuring European masterworks.  Igor also became a mentor, part father and brother.  His wife and children became Sergei’s Russian family. I saw Galina in Moscow.  Sergei made an extraordinary début in MacMillan’s “Mayerling,” and, in London, with the Stanislavsky in Petit’s “Coppelia.”

Could be mom knows him best

In the fall of 2013, just before my husband and I stopped working on the documentary, we travelled to Ukraine to film Sergei’s backstory.  We returned home a week before the first rumblings of revolution erupted in Kiev’s Independence Square. In Kiev, Galina’s exposure to the West was apparent in the transformation of her apartment. A new minimalism had replaced the Soviet décor.  The heavy brown furniture was gone.  Flocked wallpaper with flying fish was covered in white paint. By the following summer, she too seemed to have undergone a process of reinvention. Sergei had again stunned the ballet world.  He announced that he was moving to Hollywood to begin a career as a movie actor.

Back to dance

This turned out to be a short-lived experiment.  He returned to Russia in October to star opposite Zelensky in “Spartacus.”  He was soon a “permanent guest” with Zelensky’s new company in Munich. At the time his decision to quit dancing was shocking.  I e-mailed Galina, thinking she’d be devastated. Her reply took me by surprise. “I am hope Serezha will be happy in America and will do what he like,” she wrote. Perhaps she’d been putting on a brave face.  Her words struck me as those of someone who’d learned to recognize when a crisis was just another blip, someone gaining strength by letting go.

 

  • Julie Kavanagh is a freelance writer whose books include the authorized lives of Frederick Ashton and Rudolf Nureyev.

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