Over the Hill: Julie Kavanagh's biography of Rudolf Nureyev
GEPLAATST: 7-10-2008

Dancers have a tragically short active life, and what’s even more tragic, famous dancers get their biggest exposure by the time their powers are already declining. Most people who have seen Rudolf Nureyev dance, saw him when he was but a shadow of the dancer who astonished the West in the nineteen sixties.

In her new, mammoth life of Rudolf Nureyev Julie Kavanagh argues that Nureyev’s best dancing years were even fewer than we thought. Kavanagh has managed to get hold of studio footage of the dancer before he defected from the USSR, and she concludes that Nureyev was far from a perfect dancer in 1961. In his Kirov years he was an exceptional dancer, but he still had a lot to learn. Unhappy with his legs, Nureyev looked at the Kirov ballerinas for a way to make his legs look longer raising himself on his toes. No man had danced on demi-pointe before with this consistency; after Nureyev this became the standard for every male dancer, beginning a new era in male ballet dancing, East and West.

Everybody agrees the partnership of Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev was one of the greatest in dance history. Likewise everybody agrees Fonteyn was on her way to retirement by the time Nureyev came to the Royal Ballet. Spurred on by the younger dancer she was granted an extra decade to her career. Kavanagh, however, shows that Nureyev benefited just as much from this partnership. When he defected to the West his technique was iffy, his landings were rough, and he tended to trust his ability to wow the audience with big Russian jumps and barrel turns. His Le Corsaire variation was such a success he didn’t mind inserting his sensational sitting jump into Swan Lake if he felt like it. Fonteyn however showed him how to dance with understatement and make steps cohere into a full phrase, rather than showing the audience how difficult each and every step was.

As a student in the Vaganova Academy Nureyev had pored over pictures of Margot Fonteyn. This was a dancer he wanted to work with. The other Western dancer he had wanted to meet, Erik Bruhn, proved to be equally inspiring. Also he turned out to be the love of Nureyev’s life. Bruhn taught him Bourneville lightness. By the time Nureyev had absorbed these Western influences he was the consummate dancer, except for one thing. He always had to be center stage. He could not picture himself as part of an ensemble. He had to be the dancer everybody was watching.

The central irony of Nureyev’s career is that he went to the West wanting to escape the confining repertoire of the Kirov Theatre. He desperately wanted to dance Balanchine and he also wanted to dance modern, non-classical choreography. Like all dansers he wanted to dance material that was created on him. Very few contemporary choreographers however could picture a showboat like Nureyev in their work. Balanchine rejected the dancer flat-out in a way that reminds one of the strange universe that was Balanchine’s NYCB. If there was no place for star dancers in Balanchine choreography what was Suzanne Farrell doing in the NYCB? If, on the other hand, Balanchine’s point was that the ballerinas were what ballet was about, chances are Nureyev would have agreed. With one exception. Just like Balanchine.

Ironically Nureyev’s lasting legacy may well be the productions of the big classics he staged toward the end of his life for the Paris Opera Ballet. Raymonda, Don Quixote, Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and, most succesfully, La Bayadere. The irony of Nureyev’s versions of the classics is that he was virtually doing the same thing as his former artistic director at the Kirov, Yuri Grigorovich (later the longtime director of the Bolshoi). Both were replacing classical mime with dance and both were beefing up the male roles. Grigorovich, the consummate Soviet choreographer, was required to portray strong males; Nureyev did so because he wanted to show what he could do. Grigorovich was the more successful revisionist. One just has to compare the Bolshoi and the Paris Raymonda, and the choreography for the Saracen bad guy Abderakhman, originally a mime role for the aging Pavel Gerdt. While Grigorovich Abderakhman’s sexual menace provides counterweight for the onslaught of Raymonda’s countless ballerina variations, Nureyev’s Abderam is so caught up in his fidgety petit allegro steps that it’s really hard to see why Raymonda’s fiance should return to kill the Saracen, rather than let him exhaust himself doing those steps.

The same problem occurs to even more devastating effect in Nureyev’s Sleeping Beauty. When the Lilac Fairy tells lonely Prince Florimund she’s going to introduce him to this really nice girl, Aurora, he launches himself in an endless solo full of nervous steppity steps and little ronds-de-jambes. One cannot help thinking Aurora would rather sleep another hundred years than spend her life with a man this self-absorbed. More seriously, Nureyev’s choreographic interpolations raise the question if there’s any good in attempting to upgrade the male roles in these classical ballets. To Nureyev’s credit he may have had second thoughts himself. His last Petipa staging, La Bayadere, is remarkably restrained, and he seems to have been happy to let the mime stand as it is. Partly, as Kavanagh suggests, La Bayadere turned out to be this way because Nureyev just didn’t have the energy left to devise new material (apart from the duet for Solor’s friends). By the time La Bayadere premiered Nureyev was so ill with aids he was barely able to walk on stage and take the applause.

Kavanagh’s Rudolf Nureyev is roughly divided in two parts. In the first part the writer traces Nureyev’s career as artistry increases, as do his fame and the material rewards. According to Kavanagh the dancer’s 1973 assets amounted to ten million dollars, not counting homes in London, Southern France and the US - nor bundles of cash hidden under the bed. Nureyev was always scared of ending up as poor as he when he was born. For Kavanagh 1973 seems to have been the tipping point. His partnership with Fonteyn was winding down (“she’s dancing with younger men now”) and the relationship with Bruhn had foundered on the twin rocks of Nureyev’s ego and a ballet star's traveling schedule. He had no equals anymore. It was just him, and a lot of rivalling society women who needed his company and paid his restaurant bills. After Bruhn, Nureyev regarded love as ‘The Curse’. It wasn’t going to happen to him. Instead, something worse was going to happen. The seventies were Nureyev’s big cruising decade, both in New York’s bars and bath houses, and basically everywhere the dancer toured. Kavanagh reports extensively on the seventies nightlife and on Nureyev’s sex life, and it’s not a pretty picture. “I should have charged him,” says one of his one-night stands, recalling Nureyev’s callously feral attitude.

The seventies were also the era of ‘Nureyev and Friends,’ the lucrative tour vehicle in which Nureyev got to dance the modern pieces choreographers had reluctantly granted him. He even danced Balanchine’s Apollo on Broadway, in a year that the School of American Ballet was so strapped for cash Balanchine needed the royalties a Nureyev show would generate. Eventually, as Nureyev’s schedule became increasingly hectic the level sunk to such a level that Maurice Béjart insisted that Nureyev stopped performing his Le Chant du Companion, one of Nureyev’s signature pieces. Béjart and Nureyev did not enjoy a good working relationship. Later, when Nureyev had been appointed artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, Béjart would soon be calling for Nureyev’s resignation, for being insensitive to the French tradition. Others called for his resignation because he used to spend at least half the year away from Paris, touring, making money and dancing shoddily.

In many ways the story of Nuryev’s decline is a sad and sordid story. Nureyev would have done his reputation a big favor if he’d stopped dancing long before the end, focusing on his stagings of the classics instead, particularly since his choreographic interventions tended to be better if he weren’t thinking of dancing them himself. The story of this magnificent dancer falling prey to a debilitating disease is heartbreaking, and Nureyev’s caddish behavior doesn’t change a thing about this. He was especially cruel to people he had needed at some point and most likely his cruelty was caused by his insecurity. He had taught himself never to trust anyone.

Byron was a hero of Nureyev’s and the dancer never pretended to be a good person, nor did he have any illusions about living in a just world. Kavanagh’s Rudolf Nureyev is book without heroes. Margot Fonteyn and Erik Bruhn may be the closest thing to good people, and Nureyev’s Dutch friend, the choreographer Rudi van Dantzig, is ever a refreshing presence in these pages, neither a groupie, a lover or a detractor. Otherwise one wouldn’t want to meet a single person featured in this biography. That does not mean Kavanagh wrote a bad biography (although it could have been a hundred pages shorter easily). On the contrary: she wrote a book peopled by groupies running after one of the more serious cases of egomania in human memory, and yet she wrote a moving story, filled with unforgettable images.

Nureyev watching the dress rehearsal of his last labor of love, La Bayadere, on a bed hidden in the wings, is not the only lasting image one takes from this definitive biography. There is also the image of a young Nureyev holding a piece of steak against his cheek, checking if it’s sufficiently hot. There’s Nureyev rehearsing the Petipa classics in Paris and dancing all the female roles, including port-de-bras and port-de-tete, imbedded in his muscle memory, because he’d always been deeply interested in ballerina material. And, last but not least, there’s Nureyev alone in his apartment playing Bach on his keyboard, whenever he could, because for him it was all about the music.

Julie Kavanagh

Rudolf Nureyev, The Life, Penguin (UK), Pantheon (US)