The year 2015 saw me falling in love with ballet. I had always read books about it and been interested, had attended weekly classes since I was 11, and had been to the ballet multiple times, but something clicked in me when I hit 15. Having had my first pointe shoe fitting, I started watching ballet every single day on YouTube; it was all consuming. I was dancing every day, signing up for more classes as a teaching assistant for younger kids. I just couldn’t stop. This was when I found Polunin’s Take Me to Church. Perfect timing. In 2015, Polunin firmly rejoined the ballet world, when he started dating Natalia Osipova, a former Bolshoi dancer who had joined the Royal Ballet in 2013. I was already a fan of Osipova at the time, after her stunning Royal Ballet Giselle in 2014 with Carlos Acosta. She continues to be one of my all-time favorite ballet dancers, but in 2015, I had an especially strong protective feeling towards her. At the same time, it seemed that her influence on Polunin was bringing nothing but good. His performances were becoming more and more passionate, as well as technically sound. I watched one particular Giselle performance of theirs from 2015 at La Scala, over and over again. His acting in the lead part of Albrecht stunned me, and I often found myself in tears while watching. Looking back, it feels crazy, but something about his life appealed to me. It wasn’t even his actual personality that was so very compelling—the ‘bad boy’ behavior that made headlines—it was his striking natural abilities. Watching him perform felt like seeing a unicorn or getting a letter from Hogwarts. He had honed his acting abilities to a fine point, and his dancing was so unbelievably elegant at that time. I even wrote about him and Osipova in my French GCSE examination that year.

Armed as Osipova’s new boyfriend, and with the continued shock from his earlier Royal Ballet departure permanently hanging over his career, Polunin was in the papers again and again in 2016, and much to my delight, Osipova finally announced a triple bill performance with him in London at Sadlers’ Wells Theatre. I finally had an opportunity to see him, the opportunity I had lost when he left in 2012. Looking back on it, the piece itself was not the greatest. It was a combination of three modern works, one of which I described at the time as showcasing ‘stoner cavemen with vacant expressions’ (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Qutb). But Russell Maliphant and Arthur Pita managed to bring out some of Polunin’s strong points, both in Maliphant’s well-choreographed solo and Pita’s poignant piece about a James Dean-esque bad boy. The performance was billed as Natalia Osipova at Sadlers’ Wells, but everyone in that audience had come for Polunin, even me, who admired Osipova very much. I spoke to fellow audience members that night who were adamant that Polunin was the best male ballet dancer ever in the history of the world. He seemed to have the whole universe in his grip. We were enchanted. Ensorcelled. It was like watching a mythical creature.

In September 2016, Polunin also launched a documentary about his life, called Dancer. The premiere screening was in London, with a Q&A with Polunin and widely available tickets. Of course, I attended. The message of the documentary itself was that the rigid world of ballet had stifled the artist inside Polunin. From The Red Shoes to Black Swan, the story of the tortured ballet dancer has always sold well, and it’s no surprise that Dancer reiterated this well-rehearsed theme. Despite his extraordinary success, Polunin expressed in the documentary such dissatisfaction with the Royal Ballet, with his mother especially for pushing him into ballet when he was young, and with the ballet world in general. It was a humanizing documentary, but even then, I did feel a slight unease at the way he talked about ballet, saying that it wasn’t accessible to the young. I was a Polunin fan, but I was also a ballet fan, and I was only 16. Wasn’t I proof that it was accessible to the young?

During the Q&A for the Dancer premiere, my mother, who was with me, asked him what his advice would be for parents of potential dancers, for the equivalents of his parents who he seemed to blame. He looked me directly in the eyes when he answered, as if he thought I was a potential ballet dancer. He said something about how you should let your child do what they wanted when they were six—which in hindsight made very little sense—but I can still feel the thrill of that moment. Looking back, I understand so much why people are still talking about Polunin, why he still has so many fans, so many Facebook groups dedicated to him, and why I still feel so honored when I think about that moment. It is because he has such spectacular personal charm, and unlike many other ballet dancers, he has encouraged such a particularly intimate fanbase. The relationship between the artist and their audience is very profound, and there is, of course, an element of mutual reliance, as the fan consumes something the artist creates, but the artist needs the fan to keep consuming and supporting them. Most ballet dancers might have fans, but they won’t necessarily share a great deal of their personal life with their fans or interact with them especially. Polunin highlighted his personal connection with his fanbase by revealing so much about himself in Dancer and in his interviews and fan interactions.

In 2017, Polunin did his own Sadlers’ Wells triple bill, featuring Osipova in turn: Project Polunin. I merrily trotted off and booked myself into see it twice in one week. I had come to expect a certain standard. Any London ballet fans reading this may have felt a little sick at the very words Project Polunin. It was a complete disaster. The average review was generous in giving it 2 stars. I went to see it on opening night with a lot of other ballet fans, and we were all appalled. I remember distinctly the specific feeling of shock and discomfort during the performance. The night included a very old-fashioned Soviet piece by Vladimir Vasiliev, a modern short made for the Stanislavsky ballet in 2016, which ill-advisedly did not include either Polunin or Osipova (what is the point of vanity pieces if you’re not in them?) and Narcissus and Echo, a muddling narrative choreographed by Polunin himself. He was always talking about revolutionizing ballet, but when given the opportunity, he had provided us with one ancient Soviet piece and two disastrously flailing modern shorts. The actual ballets chosen were all awful, but that was to some extent forgivable. What really disappointed me were the signs I saw that Polunin’s technique was starting to slip. Here he was, famously fantastic, and I was just staring at his footwork, wondering how could it possibly have declined so much in the seven months since I had last seen him? He always claimed to not practice as much as he used to and was famous for not really attending company class when he was at the Royal Ballet, but it finally seemed to have caught up with him. Project Polunin was in fact, so disappointing, that I skipped the second night I was booked to see it to go on a date with my then girlfriend. One performance, and my mounting concerns about his dismissive words about ballet in general, and I was losing faith.

But I hadn’t given up hope yet. The last performance of the Royal Ballet’s season was a triple bill of Ashton works, including Marguerite and Armand. Listed on the ROH website, it showed Natalia Osipova and TBC as the cast for this date; the speculation was rampant. Of course, assuming that somehow, despite all the bad blood between Polunin and the Royal Ballet, about whom he spoke none too kindly in every interview, he had been given a second chance, I booked tickets. If the Royal Ballet was giving him a second chance after he walked out, I was giving him a second chance after the godawful Project Polunin. And sure enough, it was announced that he was going to be performing with Osipova. I was ecstatic. The performance was going to be my post-exam treat after my AS Levels. I couldn’t wait. It is not an overstatement to say that everyone who had tickets for that night was hoping to see Polunin, back on the one stage from which he had forever barred himself.

And then, he pulled out.

The Royal Ballet had to issue a cast change and scramble to find another guest artist to step in. I cannot even begin to imagine how Kevin O’Hare, the artistic director of the Royal Ballet, was feeling. I do know how I felt. I felt played and cheated and betrayed. It is so painful for a seventeen-year-old to feel like a dupe, a sucker for being a fan of someone who is a total sham. It’s a very specific pain that comes when you’re an awkward skinny teenager. And I felt it violently. It made it worse that he hadn’t just figuratively let me down, but that he had let down Natalia Osipova (who broke up with him not long after), who I admired so much, and the Royal Ballet, my favourite company in the world.

After the Royal Ballet incident, I dropped Polunin completely. I genuinely just didn’t care anymore. In my mind, he had betrayed the ballet world, and since I thought his performance abilities were slipping after Project Polunin, there was nothing left in him to make up for his behaviour. He tried again with another variation on the same triple bill in London at the end of 2017, which got almost equally bad reviews. He also seemed to be getting what he always wanted—he was stepping away from the ballet world a bit into film. He made it into Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017), with so little screen time you could blink and miss him, Red Sparrow (2018) with Jennifer Lawrence, White Crow (2018) and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018). But he wasn’t especially noticed for his contribution to these films, and despite everything, he was still getting roles and still getting funding to do more mixed bills in London.

And then, in November 2018, Polunin really doubled down on his ‘bad boy’ behaviour—if you can describe political fascism, homophobia and fatphobia as the typical traits of a ‘bad boy’. I remember a friend saying to me ‘Look at his Instagram. He’s gone insane.’ Polunin had posted a photo of a new tattoo of Vladimir Putin, emblazoned on his chest, thanking ‘Vladimir and everyone who is standing for good’ in the caption. Amid so much tension between Russia and Ukraine (Russia had just seized three Ukrainian boats and their crews in the Crimean that same week), this seemed a ludicrous thing for a Ukrainian dancer to post. He only seemed to become more unhinged. He continued with the same political conservatism, saying ‘you don’t like Donald Trump because he speaks the truth and speaks his mind!!!’. He added to this with some stunningly loopy comments about gender roles in ballet: ‘Man up to all men who is doing ballet there is already ballerina on stage don’t need to be two. Man should be a man and woman should be a woman. Masculine and Feminine energies creates [sic] balance. That’s a reason you got balls. Same think Outside ballet, Man what’s wrong with you? Females now trying take on the man role because you don’t fuck them and because you are an embarrassment.’ Coming into 2019, it got weirder and weirder, as he wrote: ‘Let’s slap fat people when you see them. It will help them and encourage them to lose some fat. No respect for laziness!’ All of these posts and comments have been deleted since, but at the time, they lost him a gig at the Paris Opera Ballet. The homophobic comments were especially ironic, because the main reason he was still gaining fans, five years later, was because of the Take Me to Church video, when Hozier has openly described the music video for the song as influenced by and fighting against the anti-gay propaganda in Russia.

I was baffled. I think most people were baffled. It’s one thing to be famous for doing drugs and having tattoos, but still being an amazing dancer, and another thing to be famous for having slipping technique and going completely insane on Instagram. It became a matter of simply waiting to say ‘what has Polunin done now?’ He kept the press interested with more and more shocking actions and strange behaviour, but I really did not want to hear about them. I really didn’t care anymore about his moral infractions. He had already lost my trust.

Despite the Paris Opera Ballet dropping him, Polunin still had a lot of doors open to him. He did yet another triple bill at the London Palladium, and once again, the general consensus was that it was pretty poor. He didn’t apologize for the comments on Instagram, but he deleted them, and claimed that they were misinterpreted, saying that he only meant to say that ‘It’s important to have male energy in dance.’ He also refused to apologize, saying that he is not ‘the person who apologises’. He got a fiancée and had a child. He seemed to be trying to mellow a little. But articles started to appear, like Dance Magazine’s “Can We Please Stop Talking About Sergei Polunin?” I wasn’t the only one who was heartily sick of him. Whether it was an article saying that he ‘hated to talk about ballet’ or just another article hailing ballet’s ‘bad boy’ for some minor escapade, I genuinely could not have cared less.

I have spent nearly 3,000 words talking about Sergei Polunin, just to say that I think we should stop talking about Sergei Polunin. It’s not that I think we should be entirely uninterested in him now, but because I think he hurt so many people like myself. Everything about Polunin’s image was well directed towards young fans. His famous choreography to a popular song, his tattoos, his rebellious attitude, his focus on the young in every interview, his raw honesty, his extreme personal charm—all served to make him especially appealing to people like myself. But young fans feel everything so strongly, so when he treated ballet companies badly or when he said those crazily hurtful comments or just didn’t take the art form seriously enough to practice, it hurt those fans especially badly. I really believed that he was the best male dancer of his generation. He let me down. Now, I myself, and I think many other young fans, have turned our energy towards other male dancers who are more deserving. I was (and still am) a ballet fan, not a Polunin fan. Ballet encompasses much more than individual dancers. The BBC’s recent documentary Men at the Barre perfectly showcases so many hard working, serious, respectful and talented male dancers at the Royal Ballet. The thrilling abilities of Vadim Muntagirov, who is so wonderfully peaceful to watch, or the vibrancy of Marcelino Sambé, one of the rising stars of the Royal Ballet, deserve our attention much more than the aging talents of one sad man who seems to have disappointed even himself.