There's a moment in Giselle when the ghostly Wilis reach the limit of their power. They've chased the nobleman Hilarion to his death, but something in their supernatural grip has to give. The curtain falls not on justice, but on exhaustion and inevitability. I've always thought that scene captured something true about ballet's relationship with its own mythology—the belief that some dancers are simply fated, and that fate eventually runs out.
Sergei Polunin understood this better than most. He was twenty-one years old when he resigned from the Royal Ballet, the most storied company in the classical world, and he did it with the kind of casual finality that makes careers and breaks hearts. No graceful transition, no mutual farewell statement. He simply walked away from the stage where Vaslav Nijinsky had once revolutionized the art form, and he did it in 2012, in the middle of a season. The ballet world has never fully recovered from the shock of it.
Let me be clear about what I'm not doing here: I'm not defending him. Polunin has said things publicly that are difficult to reconcile with any artist I want to celebrate. He's been inconsistent, sometimes deliberately provocative in ways that read less as rebellion and more as self-sabotage. But refusing to engage with his artistry because his personal choices are messy is like refusing to listen to Coltrane because of what he was like off the stage. The work demands attention on its own terms.
And his work, at its peak, was genuinely extraordinary. I first saw him perform live in 2010—a revival of Swan Lake at Covent Garden—and I still remember the moment in the third act when his Prince Siegfried executes a series of grand jetés across the stage. There was something almost violent about the power he generated, a physicality that felt incompatible with the ethereal precision ballet typically demands. He didn't float through the air; he attacked it. His landings were barely controlled, and that's precisely what made them thrilling. He danced like someone who understood that beauty and danger are not opposites.
The Russian ballet tradition shaped him, of course. He trained at the Kyiv Choreographic Academy starting at age nine, that brutal pipeline that produced Mikhail Baryshnikov and dozens of other Soviet-era stars. The Russian method prizes technical perfection, but more than that, it prizes a kind of spiritual intensity—a willingness to offer everything to the stage and let the chips fall. Polunin had that quality in abundance. When he arrived at the Royal Ballet in 2007, critics called him a prodigy. Some called him the future of the company.
The future, as it turned out, had other plans.
His departure from Russia—the decision to leave his homeland and eventually position himself as something outside the institutional structure of classical dance—wasn't just geography. It was a statement. In the rigid hierarchy of ballet, where dancers exist within companies like cogs in a very expensive machine, Polunin wanted to be something different. He wanted to be free, even if freedom meant instability, even if it meant losing the institutional support that most dancers depend on entirely.
This is where his story intersects with something larger than one man's career. Ballet has always had a complicated relationship with individual genius. The form demands sacrifice—years of training, physical punishment, the subordination of self to art. Companies cultivate dancers to serve the repertoire, and the best dancers often chafe under that arrangement. Baryshnikov defected. Nureyev defected. Both men found freedom and artistic growth outside the Soviet system, but they also paid prices that aren't always visible from the audience seat.
Polunin's choice to leave Russia, to remove himself from the homeland that trained him and the company that elevated him, echoes that pattern. Whether you see it as liberation or betrayal—and the ballet world has opinions on both—it represents something real about the tension between institutional belonging and artistic autonomy.
What happened after was messy and human in ways that formal write-ups rarely capture. He made films. He did that extraordinary video for Hozier's "Take Me to Church"—a piece of work so visually and emotionally striking that it racked up millions of views and introduced him to audiences who had never seen a ballet performance. He collaborated with photographers, with contemporary choreographers, with artists operating far outside the classical tradition. He also struggled. He also disappeared. He also showed up again and delivered performances that reminded everyone why they paid attention in the first place.
This is the part of the story that gets lost in the headlines about departures and destinations: the actual living of a life after the dramatic exit. Polunin didn't become a footnote. He didn't fade into irrelevance. He kept working, kept moving, kept being present in the conversation about what ballet could be and who it could belong to. That's not nothing. In an art form that devours its young and forgets its veterans with alarming speed, that's actually remarkable.
The question of where he goes next—and by "next" I mean now, in the ongoing present tense of his career—isn't really answerable. Artists like Polunin resist prediction. They're defined by their refusal to follow the script, which makes them impossible to plan around. But I find myself more interested in what his trajectory reveals about the ballet world than in any single decision he makes.
Because here's what I keep coming back to: the institutions that train and employ dancers have built their power on the idea that the art form needs them—that individual artists, however gifted, are replaceable parts in a machine that will keep running. Polunin's career suggests otherwise. His departure didn't diminish ballet; if anything, it exposed how much of ballet's mystique depends on a few extraordinary individuals being willing to give their bodies and their lives to it. Take those individuals away, let them walk out the door and choose something different, and the machine keeps turning—but differently, and maybe worse.
That's not a defense of ego or insubordination. It's an observation about what artists owe the institutions that form them, and what institutions owe the artists they shape. Polunin left Russia. He left the Royal Ballet. He may leave more places. But the conversation he started—by leaving, by refusing to be contained—hasn't ended.
And in ballet, as in any living art, that's often the most you can ask for.
