Oh Hey, This Is Just a Video of Your Ballet Boyfriend Sergei Polunin Posing Shirtless for a Sculptor, Nothing to See Here
Obviously, dancers make natural muses for sculptors. (Just ask Degas or Rodin.) What artist wouldn’t want to capture their singularly beautiful bodies—bodies that serve as instruments, bodies that speak? And when the sculpt-able dancer body in question belongs to Sergei Polunin—ballet bad boy, star of the upcoming film Red Sparrow, muse to David LaChapelle, *cough* your boyfriend *cough*—things get even more interesting.
British sculptor Frances Segelman, who’s known for her busts of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip (nbd), recently live-sculpted Polunin in London. Yes, live-sculpted—as in, he sat for her, shirtless, for two hours, in front of an audience, while she modeled him in clay. (The sculpture will later be cast in bronze.) “I saw a photograph of him and I just thought he would make such a wonderful subject, the fact that he has these tattoos and it’s unconventional,” Segelman told Reuters. “It excited me.”
Luckily for us, Reuters captured the event on tape. (The video also includes Polunin’s thoughts on the state of his dance career and the dance world generally—thoughts that are, as ever in Sergei Polunin-land, very frank.)
Happy Friday, friends:
