by “Hot head and cold brain! It took me almost 20 years to discover that this is what I need to dance well and enjoy performing,” says Natalia Osipova, principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet. “But it wasn’t always easy for me to find that balance and I used to tear myself apart, getting sick of the drama. Now, before I go on stage, I pray to God and ask him to help me control that energy.”
Hailed by the Telegraph’s dance critic Mark Monahan as a woman who “carries gravity more fully and with more poise than any other ballerina I’ve ever seen”, 38-year-old Osipova is about to enter a new season at Covent Garden, where she is. starred in Swan Lake and will take on the “regal, magical” role of Titania in The Dream – British choreographer Frederick Ashton’s witty and tender reimagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream – for the first time in a decade.
She meets me today from a coaching session with Darcey Bussell, throws her tutu into the corner of a small office in the Royal Opera House, squats like a frog on a plastic chair and reminds me of when she started out at the Bolshoi Ballet. Russia in 2004, she was more of a “volcano, a girl with sometimes destructive power, you know? The male dancers would look at me and think: ‘I don’t know how to work with that. How do you get a tornado?’”
Born in Moscow in 1986, Osipova was an unpredictable wild spirit, a tomboy who spent her early years falling out of trees and breaking windows. Her father, an engineer, had excelled in karate as a young man and encouraged her to push her physicality. She dreamed of a career in gymnastics but a few bad falls prompted her parents to steer her away from the beam and towards ballet barre. When I interviewed her in 2021, she told me that she started dancing at the age of five and was already en pointe – “jumping around like a tiny horse” – by the time she was six. age.
At eight she began serious training at the Mikhail Lavrovsky Ballet School and from 1995 to 2004 she trained at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, where she finally began to realize that she wanted to “make a life as a dancer”. But from the start, Osipova struggled with the restrictions and skulduggery of the Russian ballet world, which would eventually lead to her stepping down from her role as Bolshoi principal ballerina in 2011, citing “artistic freedom”.
“When I was only 16 years old, still at ballet school, I remember being upset to see many Russian critics approaching me dancing in Swan Lake,” she says. “They wrote amazing things because they were contradicting the director of my school. The way to hurt a teacher is to say s–t about her students but at that time I was a child and it was very painful to see such little things written about me in the newspapers.”
She bends her knees, sips sugary lemon tea and insists that this is not constructive criticism. “They didn’t write: ‘She has to learn how to move her arm this way or that way and then maybe she can fly’. They said I was square like a TV. That I had short legs. That I looked like Quasimodo. For a young girl who is not yet a woman it was very upsetting. You develop complexes at that age. I was almost broken.”
Today, Osipova credits the support of her female classmates for keeping her safe during this time, noting that “it’s a myth that female dancers are all competitors, because we were like sisters!” But she admits she was about to hang up her ballet shoes when Alexei Ratmansky recruited her for the Bolshoi. “He told me it didn’t matter what other people said because I really liked him. I started working there and focused on that.”
A young “muscle machine” well suited to the robust precision of Moscow’s style, Osipova quickly found herself scoring solos, becoming prima ballerina at the Bolshoi in 2010. Mindful of her work, she drew attention to the intense competitions at the Bolshoi, which led, by 2013, to the soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko being jailed for six years for organizing an acid attack on the company’s artistic director. Osipova and her fiancé Ivan Vasiliev moved to St Petersburg’s Mikhailovsky Ballet in 2011. Ratmansky moved to the US in 2009 and followed him 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 ballet is a different style here,” she says. “It’s almost another language. In Russia there is a different way to move the arms, the neck. I was taught to prepare for a jump like Spartacus. But I think English audiences also appreciate the Russian style.”
Shortly after moving to London, Osipova split from Vasiliev and entered into a crowd-pleasing romance with Sergei Polunin, who earned himself a reputation as a “ballet bad boy” after he quit the Royal Ballet in 2012 – just two years after he retired. their youngest principal dancer at age 19. In 2018, two years after Osipova and Polunin’s break-up, the Ukrainian almost put his career on the line by praising Vladimir Putin online, making homophobic and transphobic comments and saying that “slap ” fat people need. The Paris Opera Ballet, who had just announced his leading role in Swan Lake, fired him.
Osipova is not interested in discussing her ex-boyfriend or her international politics. “My parents are still in Russia, so it’s hard for me,” she says. She preferred 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,” she said. “It’s like he’s lifting me out of his seat with his sunny energy! I always feel braver when he’s watching me. I’m not alone, I’m not single, I know he’s my man!” She laughs. “I can’t wait for Jason to see me in my Dream suit. It’s so nice. There’s such a role Titania’s femininity, but also has great power…”
The couple first met in 2018 while performing Roy Assaf’s Six Years Later, a portrait of a fractious, long-term relationship. “Even though I call him my husband, we’re not really married,” says Osipova. “We had to cancel our wedding twice because I was sick and then because of lockdown. Now it is difficult to find time for celebration because my parents are in Russia and his parents are in America and our friends are all over the world. But we don’t really need a party. We have lived together in London for a long time and we have five dogs…” Osipova whipped out her phone to show me pictures of two shar peis, one with a samoyed and two chow chows.
“This new chow chow is a refugee from the Ukraine,” she explains, pointing out where her political sympathies lie. “I always look at 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 that this beautiful puppy was born in Poland and I had to adopt him.” She laughs and jokes about motherhood as she shares stories about her dogs. “I want children one day, no question,” she says. “More women are coming back on stage after having children. But times are always difficult for a dancer.”
Osipova reckons that “classic ballet dancing has maybe five, maybe 10 years left”. For the past three years she has struggled with an ankle injury that has forced her to cancel several shows. “I need a small piece of bone,” she explains.
“I’ll have that operation after the season and I’m hoping to rent a house in Cornwall with Jason and the dogs so I can recover in the fresh air.” She says she’s looking forward to sliding around “in my big baggy hoodie and Doc Martens. When I’m not dancing I don’t dress like a sugary ballerina. That’s not me! There’s always a bit of a protest in me.”
As a trained dancer under a stricter regime, does she worry that the younger generations lack the discipline required for excellence? “It’s not!” She laughs. “This profession, of course, requires discipline – now more than ever. It’s hard on your bones and your brain. You must be a slave to it. But it’s not the kind of slavery you’re upset about, it’s the kind of slavery that is devotion, love. The next generation has that love now and they are amazing.”
But Osipova suspects that one benefit of being an older dancer is “learning to dance just for yourself. I know now that I don’t need to be perfect to make a special show because it’s the feeling… the intelligence that grows and gives new meaning to your body.” She untangles herself from the chair and shrugs. “You can cleanse the soul with dance. And I hope it feels the same to people who watch me do it.”
Performances of Swan Lake by Natalia Osipova are on June 20 and 28; Performances of The Dream by Osipova are on June 18 and 22. roh.org.uk
