David LaChapelle's breathtaking video of a ballet dancer performing solo to "Take Me to Church" hit song by Hozier that gained 3.5 million views in just four days features a Ukrainian dancer.
Even though
many Western media referred to the star of the video, Sergei Polunin, as
Russian, the skillful dancer is actually from Ukraine.
The video was shot in last summer by LaChapelle, but
was released on YouTube only on Feb. 9. It went viral in an instant.
In the video Polunin, bare-chested and covered
in tattoos, dances to the famous song inside a barn filled with sunlight.
Through the solo dance he expresses a state of being torn apart with thougths
and doubts. One of the close-ups shows a cross tattoo on the wrist of the
dancer, in an obvious reference to the song’s lyrics.
Sergei Polunin performed to Hozier’s “Take me to Church,” directed by David LaChapelle, and choreographed by Jade Hale-Christofi.
The audience was enchanted with the talent of
Polunin, and with the video itself. “His technique, the song, the “film”
look, and his exceeding attractiveness, it’s just gold,” Diego Bertolucci
commented on YouTube.
His emotional and even desperate-looking
performance goes along with his life story. Being discovered in his early
years, the star dancer was practically deprived of regular childhood.
Polunin was born in the southern Ukrainian city
Kherson. He started his career as a gymnast at the age of four, then switching
to ballet. At 13, he already performed in the British Royal Ballet. At 19 he
quit it. “When you’ve achieved the goal, you do something
to move on,” he said in the interview to BBC on May 7, 2013.
Now Polunin dances in the Opera and
Ballet Theater in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Polunin has started a career in fashion and
modelling too. He was featured in the Marc Jacobs campaigns and photographed by
the filmmaker Gus Van Sant.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliana Romanyshyn can be reached at [email protected].
