Natalia Osipova has a unique jump, a jump that has blasé critics palpitating
as they trawl for adequate adjectives, a jump that surges with steady
propulsion, then hovers on a satiny layer of air. But she can’t jump for the
fashion photo shoot. Nobody had thought beforehand that the underskirt of
the green chiffon Dolce & Gabbana dress would be too tight. The sizzling
tangerine minidress is even tighter, so she has to change into the mustard
shorts for the arrowy jetés with which she wowed London last summer.
Osipova has just turned 21. A member of the Bolshoi Ballet since 2004, she was
unknown to British audiences until she fizzed and exploded into the
collective consciousness during the company’s last visit. She was appearing
as the heroine, Kitri, in Don Quixote. It isn’t the athletic energy of her
dancing that is impressive – tricks in themselves have an ultimately shallow
appeal – but the joyous effortlessness that makes her a natural choice for a
role such as Kitri. She is carried on the bubbles of her exuberance, as if
the physical pleasure of the dancing moment is so tremendous, she would,
when it’s over, die happy, like a short-lived moth revelling in a beam of
light.
Time was, though, when she didn’t enjoy dancing, when her dream was to be a
gymnast. “But after two years of training, they told me I would have a
problem with my back,” she says. “Gymnastics requires extreme bending, and
this was causing me pain.
So they advised me to try ballet instead. For me, as a child, it was a
tragedy.” She was nine when she entered her local ballet school – which
happened to be the Bolshoi Ballet’s academy in Moscow – and the dreary
classroom exercises did nothing to enthuse her. It was only at a school
concert that she suddenly understood what it was all about. “I performed a
Russian dance, and seeing the audience and hearing the applause, I thought,
‘Oh, they are applauding me.’ So then I decided I wanted to dance.”
Osipova has a nice line in self-deprecating humour. Tipping forward her ebony
head to reveal blonde strands at the nape, she moans about having to make
retouches every fortnight. I tell her I am baffled, as a brunette excluded
from the colour that gentlemen prefer. But raven-haired ballerinas – Diana
Vishneva of the Mariinsky, Margot Fonteyn of the Royal Ballet - are
apparently her inspiration, although it was only recently that she
discovered she shares her birthday, May 18, with Fonteyn.
Unlike Fonteyn, who famously wasn’t a natural virtuoso, Osipova has already
been type-cast as a bravura dancer, able – when not residing in the air – to
spin like a Catherine wheel on self-destruct and balance as if time and the
world have stopped. It has to be down to genes (her father practised
oriental martial arts), combined with relentless work. “Because I prepare so
hard in the rehearsal studio, I am almost 100% sure I will do the difficult
jumps or steps,” she says. Consequently, she rarely becomes fraught when she
sees a difficult passage speeding toward her. “If I’m tense, I won’t be able
to do it,” she adds sensibly. “There is a complicated sequence of fouettés
in Don Quixote, and everybody expects me to be trembling beforehand, but I
just come out and do it.” Then she has a sudden afterthought, and bursts out
laughing. “I just come out and do it because I am already thinking of the
applause!”
Although she loves bravura roles, Osipova has recently developed a hankering
for dramatic heroines such as Juliet and Giselle. “I would love to suffer on
stage,” she says. “I want to do something that really satisfies my heart.”
She owes this new direction in part to her mentor, the former Bolshoi
ballerina Marina Kondratieva, who is the ballet equivalent of a guru in the
Russian system, where each solo dancer has a personal teacher designated to
them. “She is trying to bring me up in the best Bolshoi tradition of
expressiveness. Sometimes at rehearsals, when I am doing too many
pirouettes, she says, ‘That’s good, but one more or less doesn’t matter.
What is important is the soul you bring.’ ” Even at school, Osipova hoped
Kondratieva would be her company teacher. “But when I joined the Bolshoi,
there were many ballerinas working with her, and when she saw me, she didn’t
like me very much! She said I was not her style of dancer, and she had very
little time.” The Bolshoi’s director, Alexei Ratmansky, suggested another
illustrious former ballerina, Ludmilla Semenyaka, as teacher. “She was
excellent, so I can’t say anything was wrong. But I had a dream to work with
Kondratieva, and if someone has a dream, dreams have to come true.”
Eventually, Kondratieva agreed, noticing how hard Osipova worked, and how
she might have other kinds of potential. “Probably it wasn’t very pleasant
for Ludmilla Semenyaka that I left her.” Osipova makes a sheepish face. “In
most cases, the ballerina-teacher relationship is very close. Sometimes it
happens that a ballerina leaves her mentor after 10 or 15 years, and it is a
dramatic event."
Back at the photo shoot, the photographer is clicking away. “That’s great,” he
says as she repeats a balance, one leg raised, half-bent, in front of her.
“And can you do that thing with your arm again?” Osipova’s boyfriend, a
compatriot dancer, Andrej Uspenski, now in London with the Royal Ballet,
translates “that thing with your arm”; the stylist rushes forward to adjust
a makeshift clip that is tightening the shorts’ waistband. On stage,
Osipova’s body has a muscular substance that not only makes an attractive
change from standard x-ray ballerinas, but emphasises through contrast the
floating ease of her trajectories. Off stage, though, away from the
peculiarities of stage lighting, she turns out to be a whole lot slimmer. At
5ft 5in, she is the same height as Maya Plisetskaya, the 81-year-old Bolshoi
phenomenon still dancing (more or less) last year. In her heyday,
Plisetskaya was considered a giantess. These days, Osipova is one of the
shortest ballerinas.
She might be any young, fashion-conscious woman, except that, in the
postSoviet era, Russian youth dreams less of becoming a ballet dancer than a
tennis star or a corporate lawyer. The travel is the same, the money is
better, the hours are more civilised. Osipova’s rehearsal schedules
sometimes run into the evenings, if she’s not performing. It’s a practice
that would have Royal Ballet dancers storming to their Equity
representatives without delay. For the coming London season, she is cast in
all the ballets except Spartacus, which means she will dance in the
Bolshoi’s new version of the 19th-century comedy Le Corsaire (premiered in
Moscow last month), The Bright Stream (another comedy, to a score by
Shostakovich) and, of course, Don Quixote. The fun of her Don Quixote has
such spontaneity, it must be genuinely lived. “When I come out on stage, it
just becomes my life. Of course, I do have to control myself, but each time
there is something different – my partner’s mood or my mood – and I get
engaged in the action. People might say afterward, ‘How did you manage with
such a horrible tempo?’ But I didn’t notice.” There are performances when
she is so caught up in the action, she can’t remember what she did. “I only
remember my partner’s eyes, the people around me.” Even in rehearsal, she
lets rip emotionally as well as technically.
Yet, given the grinding muscular effort required by classical ballet, I wonder
how the exuberance can override the physical strain. It is the adrenaline
rush that carries her through, she says, once she gets on stage. Even when
injured – and she has already had a few injuries – she leaves the pain in
the wings. “It happened in Washington that I was in quite a lot of pain, and
I had two matinées of Don Quixote in two days. I thought: how will I survive
this? But when I heard the applause as I entered on stage, I realised the
audience was waiting for me, and I felt well.” Maybe it’s because she’s
young that she still feels such enthusiasm. She hasn’t become jaded. “Yes,”
she nods. “I’ve heard people saying, ‘You’re young. When you grow up, all
this will pass.’ But I think: God forbid, God forbid!”
The Bolshoi Ballet is at the Coliseum, WC2, July 30-Aug 18
The ballet babes
Yuhui Choe (22, Royal Ballet). Born in Fukuoka, Japan, she joined the
Royal Ballet in 2003 after winning the Prix de Lausanne. Good at fairies
(The Sleeping Beauty) and liked for her precision and refinement, she is
being moved into prominent solo roles.
Alina Somova (21, Mariinsky Theatre Ballet). A graduate of the Vaganova
Academy, she has been fast-tracked into leading roles such as Aurora in The
Sleeping Beauty (above), and has made foreign guest appearances. Detractors
consider her long limbs and flexibility more suited to gymnastics.
Sterling Hyltin (22, New York City Ballet). Promoted to principal in
May, this slender Texan dancer was chosen by the company director, Peter
Martins, to create the role of Juliet in his new Romeo + Juliet. Her
qualities include a big jump, easy grace and delicate footwork.
Mathilde Froustey (22, Paris Opera Ballet). Winner, in 2004, of the
gold medal at Varna, the world’s most prestigious ballet competition, she
has a charm and delicate spontaneity that make her a natural for the role of
Lise in the company’s current staging of Ashton’s enchanting classic La
Fille mal gardée.
Polina Semionova (23, Staatsballett Berlin). A Moscow-trained serial
prizewinner, she has already danced a large, varied repertoire and made many
guest appearances abroad. Aged 19, she performed the lead in English
National Ballet’s Swan Lake and won wide praise as a tall, Amazonian beauty
with an elegant technique.
