Everyone up for a palate cleanser? I am.

I’m not one for mere technical feats, however amazing. But Osipova’s turns here are so amazing they made me gasp, and it takes a lot to do that because I’ve seen a lot of great turners.

Ordinarily, fouettes are not a big interest of mine, because they seem like a parlor trick rather than a feat of artistry, however much skill and strength it takes to do them successfully. I’ve written about that before, here (although the YouTube video that was originally on that post has now gone dark).

But Osipova is in another thing entirely. I assume she’s a “natural turner” par excellence (a phenomenon also explained at that link). But Osipova takes it way beyond that.

Here she mixes it up in a way that would ordinarily be outside the realm of mere mortals. It used to be in my youth that merely doing singles in a long series was enough. But somewhere during the 1970s, I think the American Balanchine-trained dancer Gelsey Kirkland threw in some doubles and it was marvelous, astounding.

However, Osipova throws in triples and everything but the kitchen sink. She plays with centripetal force and centifugal force, because in certain of these poses—leg out straight, arms up, even jumps in the middle of the series of turns, which would seem impossible—her moves are designed to throw the turner off-center. But then she pulls it all back in again by going back to the original tight move with arms close to the body, and all of a sudden we have the fastest triples in the world. Watch the portion beginning at 3:25 and you’ll see what I’ve just described towards the end of that segment around 3:50: