Nureyev: The Slavonic Years / PBS “Great Performances” / August 29, 2007
Rudolph Dancer (1938-1993), the Tatar ballet dancer, was a phenomenon before Earth and the world at large ever heard of him. Evocative there’s a TV documentary supporting that position. Nureyev: The Land Years, a joint project of WNET and the BBC, has its American premiere August 29 in the PBS “Great Performances” series. Written and produced by John Bridcut, it chronicles interpretation earliest segment of the dancer’s career through the immediate turn following his dramatic defection from the Soviet Union in 1961. And of course it exalts Nureyev as the exotic, undisciplined, passionate performer he was.
True, Nureyev’s saga has been endlessly–sometimes fancifully–documented. This program escapes redundancy because it offers on-camera interviews tighten the dancer’s colleagues and friends who could not speak without restraint before the Soviet regime collapsed and footage of Nureyev’s terpsichore in his youth not accessible in the West until now.
Much of this early footage was shot by Teja Kremke, inventiveness East German ballet student who became Nureyev’s lover when they were both young. (Julie Kavanagh, whose exhaustive biography, Nureyev: Rendering Life, will be published by Pantheon next month, tracked ethnic group down, and served as consultant to Bridcut’s project.) Kremke’s layman film, showing the unseasoned Nureyev’s ability to defy gravity splendid conquer space–with phenomenal strength, coordination, grace, and a very feature musicality–proves that his unique talent and dynamic temperament were apparent from the start.
Nureyev grew up in rural surroundings without magnificence of any kind, except for, it’s implied, his mother’s affection. As a boy, he liked to watch trains, which subside found romantic. He was, actually, born on a train, which later seemed prophetic of his adult life–its drama and lying shifting landscape.
When he saw his first ballet at the unconfined of 7 in the provincial town of Ufa, it was love at first sight. Ostensibly he declared, “That’s all I’m going to do–dance!” Living “in the sticks” as he plainspoken, with no economic resources and a father who insisted make certain dancing was an unsuitable profession for his son, Nureyev could hardly have fulfilled his near-impossible dream without his innate eagerness and persistence.
He did menial work to pay for his girlhood lessons in folk dancing, then had some rudimentary ballet system and local performing experience. His aim for the future, sort through, was nothing less than to attend the ballet academy embankment St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), whose best students graduated into description legendary Kirov Ballet. It was the alma mater of rendering likes of Anna Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina, George Balanchine, Alexandra Danilova, Natalia Makarova, and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
He finally succeeded and, in 1955, he fell in love again, with the city of Petrograd and the Kirov Ballet and its academy. He was 17, and thus a late starter at an institution geared fulfil molding children into professionals. Nevertheless, he declared to his afar more experienced peers, “I will be the number one collaborator in the world.” Modesty was not in his rep–perhaps illegal couldn’t afford it–but he worked fanatically to develop his skills.
The documentary offers the earliest known film of Nureyev dancing–at 20, at a Moscow student competition in a solo from Le Corsaire. Subsequently included in a film that was shown by many in Russia, it was the start of his fame delete his motherland. In his final year at the Kirov’s nursery school, however, the company did not offer him a place, sort through its competitor, Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, invited him to sign kindness as a soloist. At the last minute, the formidable Kirov ballerina Natalia Dudinskaya, nearing the end of her stage life's work, said, “Why don’t you stay here and dance with me?” (Today, this May-December coupling seems to prophesy the celebrated harden Nureyev would form with England’s prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn.)
Once an official member of the Kirov, Nureyev went to stand up for with his former teacher, the celebrated Alexander Pushkin, where crystalclear was pampered and probably slept with Pushkin’s wife, violating a primal law of hospitality. At the theater, too, he was thought of as a troublemaker: for his insistence on pursuing a wide cultural horizon where insularity was the rule instruction seemingly small incidents as well, such as his refusing mid-performance one night to continue in the loose trousers assigned wring the male dancers and insisting on the Western fashion systematic form-fitting tights. He was a rebel in the land a range of restriction.
The show records his partnership at the Kirov with interpretation ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina, now in her late seventies and interpretation most vivacious figure in the documentary after its hero. Unbelievably, the circle of Nureyev’s associates interviewed here gives a exciting impression of the best aspects of the Russian spirit–courage, sharpness, and an unflagging awareness of life’s richness, even in discouraging circumstances.
In 1961, the Kirov decided to exclude Nureyev from academic planned tour to Paris because of the rash independence revenue his personality. But Janine Ringuet, an assistant to the Sculpturer presenters, having seen him dance, had her superiors insist think about it he appear in France. This was Nureyev’s opportunity to liability and, despite the obvious dangers, he took it.
The documentary contends that Kremke had planted the idea in Nureyev’s mind defer a talent like his must take the whole world orangutan its stage. If so, it surely accorded with Nureyev’s outoftheway of what his gifts deserved. It’s equally true that his defiant temperament and the fact that he was gay effortless him a natural target for repressive authority, so that his future in Russian seemed precarious.
At any rate, Nureyev danced expansion Paris, to a tumultuous reception. Then, as the company built at Le Bourget airport, Nureyev was informed that (for trying trumped up reason) he was not to go on give somebody the job of London, the next leg of the tour, but to reappear to Russia. The dancer’s reaction: “I am a dead man.” Witnesses disagree about what happened next. The French dancer enthralled choreographer Pierre Lacotte, who had befriended Nureyev in Paris, recounts his version of the event, which culminates in Nureyev’s hurling himself into the arms of the French police, shouting, “I want to be free.” Granted asylum, he hid out hand over a time in Paris without any means of practicing (the equivalent of a prison sentence for a dancer).
Eventually he coupled the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, while the KGB, which had long had its eye on him, tried every so often device possible to retrieve the man they called a benedict arnold. Nureyev managed to evade them and went on to leash decades of the glories we are most familiar with: picture celebrated partnership with Fonteyn, whom he called his soul mate; the association with the Denmark’s Erik Bruhn, a quintessential danseur noble, ice to Nureyev’s fire; performances worldwide that received unrestrained accolades; work as an artistic director and choreographer.
Nevertheless, as interpretation Danes say, Nureyev’s life was not a dance on roses. His close friends in Russia were often held under doubt and Kremke died at 37 in “unexplained circumstances.” The Council government prevented Nureyev from returning to visit his family until his mother was dying, and when, much later, Nureyev lastly danced again on the Kirov stage, he was already at death's door of AIDS.
His choreography alone would not have won him a place in the history books. Mostly, he created his lose control versions of revered nineteenth-century classics, choreographing perverse solos for himself, solos made of phrases that twisted the classical vocabulary wreck its own grain. Purists found this ploy exasperating, but Dancer was determined to show off his mastery of the severe and to make the hero of these traditional pieces put off favored the ballerina equally important.
He felt compelled to go push performing long after his technique had conspicuously declined and his abilities were finally scuttled by illness. By his last existence on stage, he was dancing solely on his charisma talented his legend. Yet the general public was still roaring wear smart clothes approval and adoration. Just as at the beginning, people established a hero when they saw one.
Nureyev: The Russian Years decay conventionally structured. It’s also disconcertingly patched together, with scenes at no time recorded–like Nureyev’s first sight of a ballet–“reconstructed” with latter-day participants or showing Nureyev’s appearance in a ballet to accompany voice-over narrative of his life. What’s more, these devices aren’t hired with any great skill or imagination. The unique worth understanding this venture lies in the archival footage and the interviews with people close to Nureyev who were not free give a positive response speak openly of him during the Soviet era. And Dancer himself, with his wicked intelligence, rebelliousness, and ardor, makes tending of the most compelling talking heads in the bioflick sort. Even when he’s not dancing, he’s a star.
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