Polunin talks with great admiration of Tamara Rojo, his partner in his favourite ballet, Marguerite and Armand, with whom he will dance in Japan in the summer. “She is my favourite person to work with,” he says. “You perform twice in a whole month but for the whole month you rehearse. Which is the really boring part. I hate that part.
“But with her, it is like the joy of rehearsal as much as on stage. That is very important.” He has stopped mumbling now, and is talking with some passion. “It is your life. Ballet takes most of your time. And if you are not enjoying it…”
He pauses, and talks to Putrov about different dancers, then adds: “The stage, that’s the only time I enjoy really. I don’t enjoy my working, killing myself during the day for eight hours. I would go to the club and just move about rather than that. But on stage is something quite special. It’s a lot of good energy, adrenalin.
“I never felt scared, because I did gymnastics before ballet. And in gymnastics you are made to compete. On stage, you need people watching you. I learnt this from 12 years old. If you don’t have adrenalin it is way harder to jump and spin.”
Sergei Polunin Interview. The Telegraph
For some, this kind of non-stop dedication can become too much. Earlier this year, 22-year-old Sergei Polunin — who at 19 became the youngest person ever to have become a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet — quit the company because he wanted a “normal life”.
“Sergei is an exceptional dancer and what happens when someone that talented comes along is that everybody wants a little bit of them,” says Rojo.
“Part of the issue was that too much was asked from a 20-year-old. To be a principal dancer of one of the biggest companies in the world, to have to do a new role every four weeks because they know they can sell the house under your name and not to take into consideration that maybe what you need to do is only two new roles every year and then have time to hang out with your friends, to find a girlfriend.”
Rojo is sure he would be welcomed back at any time. “The question now is whether he wants to. A gift like the one he has can also be a sentence… Yes, of course they [the ballet companies] will open the doors, but the question is can we do it better the second time around?”
“It’s totally understandable,” she says of his decision to quit, but explains, “It wasn’t my case, because I wasn’t that talented, so things didn’t come so easily.”
This may seem unbelievable to those who have seen Rojo dance — a woman who is widely thought of as one of the world’s greatest ballerinas — but she insists: “That’s the truth. I had to fight for it, so for me I did have time to go out. I was in the Corps de Ballet. I worked hard, but I didn’t have to carry the show [at that age].”
For most dancers ballet is “tonnes of fun,” insists Rojo. “We’re not masochists. We don’t do this because we enjoy the pain, we do this because it’s fun. It’s a wonderful job.”
The young members of the Corps de Ballet socialise with one another, go drinking and date one another (“That’s a professional secret. But yes,” Rojo whispers, “they do”).
Tamara Rojo Interview. London Evening Standard
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