“A hot head and a cold brain! It took me almost twenty years to learn that I need that 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 was tearing myself apart, making myself sick with the drama. Before I go on stage, I pray to God and ask him to help me control that energy.”
Hailed by Telegraph dance critic Mark Monahan as a woman who “defies gravity more completely and serenely than any other ballerina I have ever seen”, Osipova, 38, is ready to launch herself into a new season at Covent Garden, where she will star in Swan Lake for the first time in a decade and take on the “royal, magical” role of Titania in The Dream – British choreographer Frederick Ashton’s witty and tender reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream.
Today she meets me fresh from a coaching session with Darcey Bussell, throws her tutu into the corner of a small office at the Royal Opera House, squats like a frog on a plastic chair and reminds me that when she started at the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia in 2004 she was more ‘a volcano, a girl with a sometimes destructive power, you know? The male dancers looked at me and thought, ‘I don’t know how to work with that. How do you catch a tornado?’”
Born in Moscow in 1986, Osipova was a wild, unpredictable spirit, a tomboy who spent her early years falling from trees and breaking windows. Her father, an engineer, had excelled in karate as a younger man and he encouraged her to boost her physicality. She dreamed of a career in gymnastics, but a few nasty falls prompted her parents to divert her from the beam to the 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 little horse” – by the age of six.
At the age of 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 “build a life as a dancer.” But from the start, Osipova struggled with the restrictions and deceptions of the Russian ballet world, eventually leading her to relinquish her hard-won role as Bolshoi principal ballerina in 2011, citing “artistic freedom.”
“When I was only 16 and still in ballet school, I remember being confused when I saw that many Russian critics came to see me dance in Swan Lake,” she says. “They wrote very mean things because they were in conflict with the director of my school. The way to hurt a teacher is to say things about her students, but at that time I was a child and it was really painful to see such mean things about me in the newspapers.
She hugs her knees, drinks sweet lemon tea and insists that this was not constructive criticism. “They didn’t write, ‘She has to learn to move her arms this way or that way and maybe then she can fly.’ They said I was as square as a television. That I had short legs. That I looked like Quasimodo. For a young girl who is not yet a woman, it was very disturbing. At that age you develop complexes. I was almost broken.”
Today, Osipova credits the support of fellow female students for keeping her sane during this time, noting that it is a myth “that female dancers are all rivals, because we were like sisters!” But she admits she was about to hang up her ballet shoes when Alexei Ratmansky recruited her to the Bolshoi. ‘He told me it didn’t matter what other people said because he really liked me. I then just started working and focused on that.”
A young ‘muscle machine’ well suited to the powerful precision of the Moscow style, Osipova soon found herself scoring solos and becoming the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina in 2010. While she kept her focus on her work, she ignored the intense rivalry at the Bolshoi, which in 2013 led to soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko being jailed for six years for orchestrating an acid attack on the company’s artistic director. Osipova and her then fiancé Ivan Vasiliev defected to the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. Petersburg in 2011. Ratmansky had moved to the US in 2009 and she followed him there before joining the Royal Ballet in London in 2013, where she made her debut opposite Carlos Acosta in Romeo and Juliet.
“When I first came to London I was worried because the ballet here has a different style,” she says. “It’s almost a different language. In Russia there is another way to move the arms, the neck. I learned to prepare for a jump like Spartacus. But I think the English audience also appreciates the Russian style.”
Shortly after moving to London, Osipova split from Vasiliev and embarked on a crowd-pleasing romance with Sergei Polunin, who had built himself a reputation as the ‘bad boy of ballet’ after leaving the Royal Ballet in 2012 – only two years after becoming their youngest principal dancer, 19 years old. In 2018, two years after Osipova and Polunin split, the Ukrainian nearly imploded his 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 his leading role in Swan Lake, fired him.
Osipova is not interested in discussing her ex-boyfriend or international politics. “My parents are still in Russia, so it’s difficult for me,” she says. She much 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,” she glows. “It’s like he lifts me off his chair with his sunny energy! I always feel braver when he looks at me. I’m not alone, I’m not single, I know this is my man right there!” She grins. “I can’t wait for Jason to see me in my costume for The Dream. It is so beautiful. Titania is such a feminine role, but she also has some damn power…’
The couple first met in 2018 during the performance of Roy Assaf’s Six Years Later, a portrait of a difficult, long-term relationship. “Although I call him my husband, we are not really married,” Osipova says. “We had to cancel our wedding twice because I got sick and then because of the lockdown. Now it’s hard to find time for a party 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’ve lived together in London for a long time and we have five dogs…’ Osipova holds up her phone and shows me photos of two Shar Peis, a Samoyed and two Chow Chows.
“This new chow-chow is a refugee from Ukraine,” she explains, indicating where her political sympathies lie. “I always look at an Instagram page of breeders who had to flee Ukraine when the war broke out. Oh my god, it’s so sad, people have lost their homes, everything, but some have their dogs. I saw that this beautiful puppy was born in Poland and I had to take him with me. She cherishes and broods motherly as she shares anecdotes about her dogs. “I really want children one day, there’s no doubt about that,” she says. “More and more women are returning to the stage after having children. But the timing is always difficult for a dancer.”
Osipova suspects that she will “maybe dance classical ballet for another five, maybe ten years.” For the past three years, she has struggled with an ankle injury that forced her to cancel several shows. “I need to remove a small piece of bone,” she explains.
“I will have that operation after the season and hopefully 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 hanging out “in my big baggy hoodie and Doc Martens. When I’m not dancing, I don’t dress like a sweet ballerina. I’m not that! I always have a little bit of protest in me.
As a dancer trained under a stricter regime, does she worry that younger generations lack the discipline necessary for greatness? “No!” She laughs. “This profession obviously requires discipline – now as much as ever. It’s hard on your bones and your brain. You have to be a slave to it. But it’s not the kind of slavery you’re angry about, it’s the kind of slavery that involves devotion and love. The generation coming up now has that love and they are amazing.”
But Osipova suspects that one advantage of being an older dancer is that you “learn to dance just for yourself.” I know now that I don’t have to be perfect to make a show special, because it’s the feeling… the intelligence that grows and gives your body a new meaning.” She pulls away from the chair and shrugs. “You can cleanse the soul with dance. And I hope it feels the same to people who see me do it.”
The performances of Swan Lake with Natalia Osipova are on June 20 and 28; The Dream’s performances with Osipova are on June 18 and 22. roh.org.uk