gramilano

Cer­tainly quicker than it takes to escape from a Turk­ish prison, ballet’s bad boy Sergei Polunin has dis­ap­peared from Peter Schau­fuss’ pro­duc­tion of Mid­night Express. The show is due to open on Tues­day in Lon­don but accord­ing the the Lon­don Even­ing Stand­ard he has not shown up for rehears­als, is not answer­ing his phone, and is not in his hotel. The offi­cial state­ment simply says he has with­drawn due to “unfore­seen circumstances”.

His last dis­ap­pear­ing act — from the Royal Bal­let in Janu­ary of 2012 — aston­ished the bal­let world, but it was thought that becom­ing part of the Stan­islavsky com­pany under the watch­ful eye of his mentor Igor Zelensky had given him the sta­bil­ity and free­dom he was search­ing for. A dis­ap­poin­ted Schau­fuss said,

I really hope that it’s not a repeat of last year when he walked out. He seemed to have matured a lot and become more con­fid­ent. Until now, we had no reason to believe otherwise.

Zelensky is also in the cast, and the role, based on Billy Hayes’s auto­bi­o­graph­ical story of a young man jailed in Tur­key for drug-smuggling, seems tailor made for Polunin, all of which makes his with­drawal even more surprising.

Just a month ago in an inter­view with The Times, Polunin stated,

I did try cocaine, but it was more of an exper­i­ment than an addic­tion. Though the shows were great, because coke gives you unlim­ited energy. But Igor Zelensky has been teach­ing me to get that energy from within myself and not to put my energy into club­bing; to put it into per­form­ance and enjoy the adren­alin you get from it.

How­ever, as dance writer Gra­ham Watts said in a recent series of tweets, nobody yet knows what is going on,

I’m dis­ap­poin­ted to read that the #Mid­nigh­t­Ex­press affair is about Sergei van­ish­ing or has any­thing to do with so-called “life­style” issues. I believe the prob­lem is artistic dif­fer­ences between Polunin/Zelensky and the dir­ector which are irre­con­cil­able. I am not tak­ing sides but I believe that this is an artistic issue that could not be resolved. and noth­ing more.

Quite pos­sibly so (espe­cially being that Zelensky, too, has left the cast), but as there must have been videos avail­able of this pro­duc­tion from way back in 2000, and know­ing that many people must have bought tick­ets because of Polunin’s pres­ence and not the rather shaky repu­ta­tion of Schau­fuss’ com­pany after last year’s dis­astrous Tchaikovsky pro­gramme, it seems an irre­spons­ible act, to say the least.

As Judith Mack­rell said in The Guard­ian,

Cer­tainly it’s hard not to feel nos­tal­gia for the ethos that George Bal­anchine main­tained dur­ing his four dec­ades as cho­reo­grapher and dir­ector of New York City Bal­let: so strong was his belief that the cho­reo­graphy coun­ted for everything that Bal­anchine res­isted advert­ising the cast­ing of bal­lets in advance.

Polunin will be replaced by Johan Christensen. The show runs from 9–15 April at the Lon­don Coli­seum. The box-office are offer­ing refunds to Polunin fans…

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