How tall is Kimin Kim? That’s the first question that comes up when you type the Mariinsky principal’s name into an internet search engine. “I’m 183cm — 6ft, since you ask,” he says with a laugh. “Not so tall. I’d like to be taller, 190cm maybe. But I am lucky, because my height allows me to dance with the tall ballerinas — and I can dance with the little ones as well.”
On stage, Kim’s height is also the first thing you notice about him. The 24-year-old Korean, the first principal of the Mariinsky Ballet to be born outside Russia, is like an elegant, tapered blade, his slim limbs topped with a crown of sleek dark hair. But it’s the lightness of his jump, the beauty of his movement, that ultimately catches the eye. Like all excellent dancers, he seems to mould a space in the atmosphere where he can exist and flourish.
This is all the more unusual because of his nationality. Ballet is big in South Korea, and the quality of the talent there is starting to catch the world’s attention in international competitions. But at the moment Kim is probably the most famous Korean dancer in the world. “Audiences love him,” says his teacher, Vladimir Kim (no relation). “But he is too modest to tell you that.”
British audiences will have a chance to see what all the fuss is about when Kim dances the cheeky barber Basil in Don Quixote, opposite the dazzling Viktoria Tereshkina as Kitri, at the opening of the Mariinsky Ballet’s summer season at Covent Garden this month. Later he can be seen in Wayne McGregor’s Infra and in La Bayadère: “My favourite ballet, I love the music.”
It was while performing as the warrior Solor in Bayadère that he sustained a stress fracture in his foot, which kept him away from the stage for a year. He is phlegmatic as he describes what happened. “I had danced quite a lot before that, made a jump and felt this sharp pain. I danced the second act, but then I had to stop. It was quite a difficult fracture. Some people are off for two to three years, but I was lucky that I got back in a year.”
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He had never been injured before. For a dancer who has experienced such a meteoric rise, the inaction until his return to the stage in June must have been difficult. “At first, of course, I was subdued and sad,” he says. “But later I realised I could work to come back as soon as possible.”
This is a typical Kim answer. Off stage, he is incredibly polite but almost completely opaque. He doesn’t give anything away.
Kim Sr, Vladimir, is an important presence in the dancer’s life. Kim calls him “father”, and his wife and fellow teacher, Margarita Kulik, “mother”. He lives with them in St Petersburg; his parents are back in Seoul. “But they visit, and we are on good terms with them,” Vladimir says. “He has two mums and two dads.”
Kimin Kim fell in love with ballet at the age of 10, when he saw a Korean company in The Sleeping Beauty. “I was so touched by it, I was weeping and crying. I had a feeling I would like to pass the same feeling to others.” He began ballet training in a local school, but once he moved to Seoul, he came under the wing of Kim and Kullik, both former Mariinsky soloists trained at the famous Vaganova school, who were teaching at the Korea National University of Arts.
“I wasn’t that impressed when I first saw him,” Vladimir confesses. “He had good co-ordination and turned well, but he lacked the basics, he lacked quality. In the first two years, he was always interested in trying to improve his technique, while I tried to instil in him that ballet is not just about jumps and tricks, it is about self-expression — the expression of music and polished style.”
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The refinement of his dancing, the sense that he had, despite his foreign origins, been gifted with the deep lessons of a pure Russian training, caught the eye of the Mariinsky’s director, Yuri Fateyev, who auditioned him when the company was on tour in Korea. When he offered Kim a place, it was almost beyond belief. “As a child, I was dreaming about the Mariinsky, but I knew it didn’t usually take foreigners,” Kim says.
His arrival in St Petersburg at the age of 19 had a nightmare edge as well. “I could only say hello and goodbye in Russian, so the first six months were really difficult. The people in the theatre received me very well, and I am grateful for that, but it was such a different culture. Everything was strange to me — the food, the etiquette. Only the dancing kept me going.”
Once his teachers arrived, matters improved, and he has come to regard St Petersburg as home. Just three years after his arrival, he was promoted to principal. Now he is at the point in his career when he is both looking forward to new roles and more complex challenges, and looking back. During his convalescence, he has been watching videos of the company in the 1980s and 1990s, and has noticed a difference in style. Vladimir Kim explains: “There were more personalities on stage, and a deeper understanding of character and expression of character.”
Is that inspiring for Kimin? “It is what I am trying to do. It is usually given by God, but I am working.”
He doesn’t doubt the relevance of all he is trying to do. “Although the ballet is not thought of as very connected with real life, it is exactly what is needed, because it gives the feeling of kindness and light and beauty,” he says. “When people watch a ballet, we help them to feel good.”
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Kimin Kim is in the Mariinsky Ballet’s Don Quixote, ROH, London WC2, July 24
