The Bolshoi Ballet’s wunderkind ballerina Natalia Osipova defied received wisdom when, in 2012, she cast off from the great Moscow company with her equally prodigious then boyfriend and partner Ivan Vasiliev to go freelance. Without the Bolshoi’s unmatched support system, its coaching and opportunities, its reputation behind her, protested the Russian media, how could she thrive?
Much the same was said over here the following year when the Royal Ballet’s precocious young star, the matchlessly graceful, imperiously aquiline Sergei Polunin thumbed his nose at a cornucopia of Covent Garden leading roles and skipped off to an uncertain future trailing behind him incoherent tweets about wanting to run a tattoo parlour.
While Polunin attempted to find himself in handsome pop videos and fashion shoots, Osipova and Vasiliev were capitalising on their fame as ballet’s Brangelina and did a contemporary ballet programme in 2014, Solo for Two, where she in particular could express herself, as the saying goes. But then — shock horror — they split up.
Last summer the thing many ballet goers fantasised about, and many others dreaded, happened: the two world famous rebels, Osipova and Polunin, met and fell in love. And now they only want to dance with each other. Brangelina II. Maybe even bigger than Brangelina I.
All this is essential background to the new Osipova programme produced by Sadler’s Wells, which is as suggestively autobiographical as her earlier one with Vasiliev, using two of the same choreographers and attempting much the same argument — which is that she wants to emulate Sylvie Guillem’s versatility as a muse to contemporary choreographers, while celebrating her romantic partnership.
There are two problems. First, Osipova and Polunin are above all extraordinary classical dancers in their prime, and are too young to be ready for Guillem’s sort of commitment to a different physical world.
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