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If I get angry, a child feels that energy.” He’s even getting rid of his tattoos as he wants to be “clean”, and is halfway through an agonising two-year process of getting them lasered off. “Because you connect to them with energy, you have to be right with yourself. “Kids change us in a positive way, for sure,” he says. But in 2019 he met Olympic figure skater Elena Ilinykh, and their son, Mir, was born in January 2020. He made headlines for the 30m YouTube views of his Take Me to Church video, but also for missing shows, for his critical flops, his misguided tweets (from drug chat to homophobia) and his chest tattoo of Vladimir Putin’s face. Known as a technically brilliant but erratic dancer, Polunin was the youngest principal at the Royal Ballet, aged 19, but walked out of the company two years later. It marks the end of an eventful couple of years for Polunin, and perhaps a turning point. This is Kobborg’s new production of Romeo and Juliet, which Polunin danced with star ballerina Alina Cojocaru in Verona pre-Covid, now being remounted for London’s Royal Albert Hall. Dressed in black with a rock star vibe, a faded tattoo visible on his hand, he eyes himself in the mirror before flying into the centre and launching into five or six pirouettes, like a bird of prey swooping into a flock of starlings. To the side stands the tall figure of Sergei Polunin.
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“Throw her!” he says to one man handling his partner too tentatively.
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Choreographer Johan Kobborg shouts for more gusto. D ancers sweep across studio seven at London’s Pineapple Studios, skipping through Prokofiev’s rhythms.