“A warm head and a cold brain! “It took me almost 20 years to learn that this was what I needed to dance well and enjoy performing,” says Natalia Osipova, principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet. “But finding that balance wasn’t always easy for me, and I was tearing myself apart and feeling sick from the drama. “Now before I go on stage, I pray to God and ask Him to help me control this energy.”
Osipova, 38, who Telegraph dance critic Mark Monahan praised as a woman who “defies gravity more fully and calmly than any other ballerina I have ever seen”, is set to start a new season at Covent Garden. She will star in Swan Lake and, for the first time in a decade, take on the “magnificent, magical” role of Titania in The Dream, British choreographer Frederick Ashton’s witty and tender revival of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
She meets me today, fresh from a coaching session with Darcey Bussell, throws her tutu in the corner of a small office at the Royal Opera House, squats frog-like on a plastic chair, and reminds me that she started with the Bolshoi Ballet in 2010. In Russia in 2004, she was more “like a volcano, a girl with destructive power sometimes, you know? Male dancers were looking at me and thinking: ‘I don’t know how to work with this. How do you catch a hurricane?’”
Born in Moscow in 1986, Osipova had a wild, unpredictable spirit; She was a tomboy who spent her early years falling from trees and breaking windows. His father, an engineer, excelled at karate in his youth and encouraged him to push his physicality. She dreamed of a career in gymnastics, but a few bad falls led her parents to steer her away from the beam and toward the ballet barre. When I interviewed him in 2021, he told me that he started dancing at the age of five, and by the age of six he was already en pointe, or “jumping like a little horse.”
She began serious training at the age of eight at the Mikhail Lavrovsky Ballet School, and from 1995 to 2004 she trained at the Moscow State Choreographic Academy, where she eventually began to realize that she wanted to “make a life as a dancer”. But Osipova struggled from the beginning with the restrictions and chicanery of the Russian ballet world; This would eventually see her give up her hard-won role as the Bolshoi’s principal ballerina in 2011, citing “artistic freedom”.
“When I was just 16, still at ballet school, I remember being confused when I saw that many Russian critics had come to see me dance in Swan Lake,” she says. “They wrote very bad things because they had a disagreement with the school principal. “The way to hurt a teacher is to say things about his students, but I was a kid then and it was really painful to see such bad things written about me in the newspapers.”
He hugs his knees, sips his sugary lemon tea, and emphasizes that this is not constructive criticism. “They didn’t write, ‘He needs to learn to move his arms this way or that way, maybe then he can fly.’ They said I was square like a television. I had short legs. I looked like Quasimodo. This was very sad for a young girl who was not yet a woman. At that age you develop complexes. I almost broke down.
Today, Osipova credits the support of her fellow female students with keeping her sane during this time, citing the fact that “the female dancers were all rivals, because we were like sisters!” He points out that there is a legend in the form of. But she admits that she was on the verge of hanging up her ballet shoes when Alexei Ratmansky summoned her to the Bolshoi. “He told me it didn’t matter what others said because he really liked me. “That’s when I started working and focused on that.”
A young “muscle machine” well suited to the powerful sensibility of the Moscow style, Osipova quickly found herself performing solos and became the Bolshoi’s principal ballerina in 2010. In 2013, the Bolshoi sentenced soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko to six years in prison for an acid attack on the company’s artistic director. Osipova and her then-fiance Ivan Vasiliev in St. Petersburg in 2011. They took refuge in the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg. Ratmansky had moved to the US in 2009 and he followed her there before joining the Royal Ballet in London in 2013, making her debut opposite Carlos Acosta in Romeo and Juliet.
“When I first came to London, I was worried because the ballet here is a different style,” she says. “It’s almost a different language. In Russia there is a different way to move the arms and neck. I was taught to prepare for a jump like Spartacus. But I think British audiences also appreciate the Russian style.”
Osipova split from Vasiliev shortly after moving to London, and after leaving the Royal Ballet in 2012 – just two years later – she embarked on a crowd-pleasing romance with Sergei Polunin, who had gained a reputation as “ballet’s bad boy”. Their youngest principal dancer was 19 years old. In 2018, two years after Osipova and Polunin’s split, the Ukrainian actress nearly ruined her career by praising Vladimir Putin online, making homophobic and transphobic comments and saying fat people needed “a slap.” The Paris Opera Ballet, which had just announced the title role in Swan Lake, fired him.
Osipova does not want to talk about her ex-boyfriend or international politics. “It’s very difficult for me because my parents are still in Russia,” she says. She prefers to talk about her “husband,” the American-born contemporary dancer and choreographer Jason Kittelberger. “I love it when he comes to watch me on stage,” he beams. “It’s like he’s lifting me up from his seat with solar energy! I always feel braver when he watches me. I’m not alone, I’m not single, I know that’s my man over there!” She grins she. “I can’t wait for Jason to see me in my costume from The Dream. So cute. Titania is such a feminine role, but she also has such damn strength…”
The couple first met in 2018 while performing Roy Assaf’s Six Years Later, a portrait of a long-term, fractious relationship. “Although I call him my husband, we are not actually married,” Osipova says. “We had to cancel our wedding twice because I got sick and quarantined. It’s hard to find time to celebrate anymore because my parents are in Russia, his family is in America, and our friends are all over the world. But we don’t actually need a party. We have lived together in London for a long time and we have five dogs…” Osipova hands me her phone and shows photos of two shar pei, a samoyed and two chow chow.
“This new dish is a refugee from Ukraine,” he explains, hinting at where his political sympathies lie. “I always watch the Instagram page of breeders who had to flee Ukraine when the war started. Oh my God, it’s so sad, people lost their homes, everything, but some of them have dogs. I saw this beautiful puppy being born in Poland and I had to take him away.” She coos and worries like a mother as she shares anecdotes about her dogs. “I really want children one day, there’s no doubt about that,” she says. “After having children, more and more women are on the scene. But timing is always difficult for a dancer.”
Osipova estimates that she has “maybe five, maybe 10 years left to do classical ballet.” He has been struggling with an ankle injury for the last three years, forcing him to cancel many shows. “I need a small piece of bone removed,” she explains.
“I will have this surgery at the end of the season and hopefully rent a house in Cornwall with Jason and the dogs so I can recover in the fresh air.” He says he can’t wait to walk around “in my big baggy hoodie and Doc Martens.” When I’m not dancing, I don’t dress like a sweet ballerina. That is not me! There’s always a little protest inside me.
As a dancer who trained under a stricter regime, does she worry that younger generations lack the discipline needed for excellence? “NO!” Laughs. “Of course, this profession requires discipline; now as much as ever. It’s hard on your bones and your brain. You must be his slave. But this is not the kind of slavery that you feel sorry for, this is the kind of slavery that is devotion, love. “The generation that is coming now has this love and they are amazing.”
But Osipova suspects that one of the advantages of being an older dancer is “learning to dance on your own.” I now know that I don’t have to be perfect to make a show special, because it’s the emotion… the intelligence that grows and gives new meaning to your body.” He pulls himself out of the chair and shrugs. “You can cleanse the soul with dance. I hope the people who watch me do it feel the same way. “
Swan Lake performances starring Natalia Osipova are on June 20 and 28; The Dream’s performances with Osipova are on June 18 and 22. roh.org.uk