Dancing to his own tune

He may have had a reputation as the coke-snorting bad boy of ballet, but Helen Barlow found there’s a lot more to Sergei Polunin. He talks about dancing to Hozier and how he came to possess Mickey Rourke’s bloody pants.

When Dancer opened the Cork Film Festival it may have not have been the first time local audiences had laid eyes on the talents of Sergei Polunin. Some audience members undoubtedly had contributed to the viral phenomenon that saw his dance to Hozier’s ‘Take Me to Church’ reach almost 19 million views on YouTube.

How the dance came about and what drove the supposed “bad boy of British ballet” to do it is all revealed in the Steven Cantor’s documentary Dancer, a kind of cautionary tale about the sacrifices dancers make from an early age, but also highlighting the talents of this remarkable performer.