Dance: Man in Motion

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The doors of the blue bus hissed open and 120 members of the Leningrad-Kirov Ballet filed into the waiting room at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport. Once they were inside, one of the troupe’s two “bodyguards” grimly stationed himself at the main exit. As he did, a young, sullen-faced dancer in an ill-fitting grey suit drifted away from the group. Then, suddenly hurrying his pace, he disappeared into the swarm of travelers. The second bodyguard gave chase, frantically pawed his way through the crowd until he found the dancer hiding behind a pillar. “I won’t go!” the dancer screamed, and they began to grapple. Wrenching himself free, the dancer bolted into the airport bar and flung himself into the arms of two startled French policemen. “I want to stay!” he cried. “I want to stay!”

So began the career of Rudolf Nureyev in the West. As entrances go, it could not have been more compelling if it had been choreographed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the four years since his leap to freedom, Nureyev (pronounced Nu-ray-yef) has never stopped going up. At first he was a side-show curiosity, a defector in tights. Critics dubbed him “the dancing bear” and “the boy Sputnik.” But as he danced across the stages of Europe and North America, the wondering soon turned to wonder. Now, on the eve of a three-month return tour of the U.S. with Britain’s Royal Ballet, Rudolf Nureyev stands out as one of the most electrifying male dancers of all time.

Not since Vaslav Nijinsky stunned audiences with his aerial virtuosity half a century ago has a male dancer so completely captivated the world of ballet. When he leaves the theater, hordes of glaze-eyed females of all ages have been known to surround his car and fall on their knees chanting “Thank you, thank you.” The admiration extends backstage as well. Whenever he performs, dancers crowd the wings to watch and learn. “Watching Rudi is more than an education,” explains the Royal Ballet’s Alexander Grant. “He makes every step seem beautiful, possible and important.”

Prince & Swan. If this were not enough, Nureyev has been further blessed with a classic partner—Dame Margot Fonteyn, long the reigning ballerina of the Western world. Since they teamed up on the stage of the Royal Ballet three seasons ago, a mystique has grown up around them that rivals the most ethereal fantasies they portray onstage. They have about them all the magic makings for a fairy-tale romance. He is 27, a moody, mysterious Tartar bristling with savage charm. She is 45, an alabaster beauty of elegant refinement. He is the glittering young prince in the first bloom of creative life. She is the dying swan in the last flutter of a shining career.

When Rudi came roaring out of the East, Margot was fading. Now, fired by his inspiration, she has risen to new heights. That their hour onstage must be so brief—at best, she has perhaps only three more years of dancing left —only heightens the tragic beauty of it all. The principals themselves are not untouched. Their curtain calls have become ballets in miniature. They are always the same. Margot lovingly plucks a flower from her bouquet, tenderly puts it to her lips, and with a deep curtsy presents it to Rudi. He in turn humbly sinks to one knee and kisses her hand for one long, frozen moment. This brings a shower of flowers from the galleries and often a laurel wreath, which Rudi solemnly places on his head. Then they stand there with arms outstretched until the stage around them is blanketed with blossoms.

Neglected Child. Nureyev and Fonteyn have danced together some 170 times, and rarely before anything but sold-out houses. The night before tickets go on sale, hundreds of eager Britons set up camp outside the Covent Garden box office, where prices are listed in three categories: matinees, evenings, and Nureyev-Fonteyn. By noon there is not a single ticket to be had in all of London, except from scalpers, and they command up to $420. It is the same wherever Nureyev and Fonteyn go. At the inaugural gala for President Johnson in January, featuring the biggest names in the entertainment world, Nureyev and Fonteyn’s pas de deux from Le Corsaire won the longest ovation of the evening. As one critic crassly but correctly put it: “They are the hottest little team in show biz.”

As such, they have attracted scores of people to the ballet who would not know a pirouette from a pratfall. They symbolize, in fact, a major resurgence of interest in the dance, long culture’s most neglected child. A decade ago, there were only 75 dance companies in the U.S.; today there are 225, amateur, semiprofessional and professional. In New York, for instance, the Royal Ballet was preceded by a four-week season mounted by the American Ballet Theatre, and will run concurrently with a five-week season of Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Washington now has its own ballet company, and Boston, which in 1929 banned females from dancing “in legs bare,” this year welcomed its first professional ballet group with a sold-out season. Last month Los Angeles launched its first resident ballet company with an appropriately spectacular champagne gala.

Frosty Abstracts. This renaissance has come in two parts, at least so far as the U.S. is concerned. Parties to the first part have been the postwar invasion of the classic Russian companies, along with visits from the genial Royal Danish Ballet and the Royal Ballet itself, all leaving their homelands for the first time and demonstrating to the U.S. just what a combination of muscular brio and enchanted spectacle the classical ballet can be.

The wave of excitement and interest engendered by these first-time-ever events gave a new impetus to a whole area of native products that had been just struggling along, depending on the loyal support of a relatively small band of devoted followers. Most devoted (and most scornful of all variants) are the admirers of George Balanchine, whose subtle, complex and frostily abstract ballets are accepted as the best and most inventive of modern choreography. Balanchine’s disciples feel that Nureyev and company are old hat. The less sophisticated complain that the Balanchine abstractions, though fascinating, lack emotional substance, and find a long diet of them debilitating.

Then there is the school of dancers who scorn both Nureyev and Balanchine. They dance barefoot, and expression is their watchword. Anyone who does not wear a leotard or Levi’s is suspect, and a tutu is anathema. Martha Graham is their goddess, José Limon her consort. But in the general upsurge of interest in the dance, they have moved out of the borrowed high school auditorium, the dingy halls and one-night stands in Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y.M.H.A. into engagements at the glittering New York State Theater and Philharmonic Hall.

They are mostly American, but even Europe has felt their impact. Amsterdam’s Netherlands Dance Theater, with three U.S. choreographers, has become in its six years of existence one of the Continent’s most excitingly creative companies. Under the influence of U.S. modern dancers, John Cranko has made a new place for Stuttgart’s Opera Ballet, as Maurice Bejart has at Brussels. Even London itself has taken to the modern dance, with the U.S.’s Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Alvin Ailey scoring one resounding success after another.

Changed Image. But just as there are those who will always prefer Beethoven to Stravinsky, the classic ballet will always keep a central place in the repertory of the dance. And as part and parcel of the classic revival, there has been a resurgence of the male virtuoso.

In its primitive beginnings around some tribal fire, and later in the more elegant surroundings of the courts of Paris, dancing was always dominated by the male. A long line of kings—Francis II, Charles IX, Louis XIII—cut some mean figures on the palace dance floor. King Louis XIV, too fat to solo, founded the world’s first ballet company (1669) to carry on in his stead. Only then, for decorative purposes, did women eventually begin to creep into the act. As skirts went up and heels came off, the ladies came more and more to the fore, setting the stage in 1832 for the appearance of Marie Taglioni, a gossamer goddess who took Paris by storm with the neat little trick of dancing on her toes.

Ever since, save for a brief flourish of male virtuosos led by Nijinsky in the early 1900s, the prevailing attitude has been, as so often repeated by the New York City Ballet’s George Balanchine, that “ballet is woman.” Now the men are coming back. In fact, the whole image of the male dancer is changing. Jacques d’Amboise, for example, could pass as a halfback for the New York Giants rather than what he is, a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet. Still, shrugs D’Amboise, whenever he is introduced to someone, “I see in their eyes the nagging question: ‘Is he a man?'” Many male dancers are not.

Sometime Freak. So what? cry some balletomanes. Indeed, homosexual dancers can be the most manly of performers. But not always, and the sissy reputation they have given the art has deterred a large segment of the male population from ever going to see “one of those pansy ballets,” much less even considering the dance as a career. Even today, if a boy hints that he might like to be a dancer, he becomes the playground freak, and Daddy goes rushing off to consult the family psychiatrist.

But times are changing, and where once the ratio of girls to boys taking up the dance was 50 to 1, it is now about 15 to 1. As a result, the world’s top ballet companies can now boast the most gifted generation of male dancers ever.

> The Royal Danish Ballet’s Erik Bruhn, 36, is the supreme danseur noble. Among dancers, his technique is rated as the closest thing yet to classic perfection. Eschewing fire for finesse, he wins with his princely grace and finely chiseled Nordic profile. Says Italy’s Prima Ballerina Clara Fracci: “Nureyev is like Callas singing Bellini; Bruhn is like Schwarzkopf singing Mozart.”

>The New York City Ballet’s Edward Villella, 29, a former amateur boxer and baseball player, is a masterful actor and prodigious jumper. Slight, darkly handsome, he brings a rambunctious joie de vivre to the dance that has made him the darling of the galleries and, with D’Amboise, the new hope for male dancers in the U.S.

> The Bolshoi Ballet’s Vladimir Vasiliev, 25, is an impetuous, thick-legged virtuoso of the acrobatic. He is perhaps the highest jumper of them all. And at the Bolshoi, where spectacle comes before style, that counts for everything. An accomplished painter and passionate actor, he excels at such character roles as Basil in Don Quixote and the prince in Cinderella.

> The Leningrad-Kirov Ballet’s Yuri Soloviev, 25, is the shining archetype of the precise, understated 19th century classical tradition espoused by the Kirov. Though constructed along the lines of a weight lifter, he is a gracefully lyrical dancer noted for his long, floating leaps.

Then there is Rudolf Nureyev. Onstage he is bigger than life. In life he is barely 5 ft. 8 in., a lithe, finely muscled 160 Ibs. He has the look of a petulant faun—pouting mouth, sharp features, hollow cheeks—topped off with a shaggy, leonine swirl of hair that looks as if it had been combed with an electric mixer. He trims it himself, with toenail clippers. Says Ballerina Sonia Arova: “Whenever we are dancing together, I spend all my offstage time pinning up his hair and spraying it. He feels it is very poetic.” One unimpressed critic dismissed him as “the senior member of the Rolling Stones.”

To all critics, Nureyev has a stock reply: “I am Nureyev, dancer, nothing more than that. I am on sale. It is free enterprise. If you like, you buy. If you don’t like, you leave alone.”

On Wire. His incredibly high, arching jumps always bring a gasp from the audience. With head back, one arm extended to point the course, he effortlessly lifts off and then, as he says, “I fly.” His trajectory is beyond the proper limits of the body. At the apex of his elevation he hangs in mid-air for one long impossible crucial moment, as if suspended by piano wire, before making his feathery descent. His legs scissoring like hummingbird wings, he can rocket four feet straight up in the air with just the slightest bend of his coiled-spring legs.

Nureyev carries with him a magnetic atmosphere full of electricity and surprise, some hint of inscrutable purpose that makes his simple presence the most significant fact of the ballet. His style is marked by a sublime ellipsis in tempo, an aerial freedom, a sense of allegro melancholy. His transitions within a variation are pure and unlabored, most wonderfully in La Bayadère, a kind of balletic obstacle course that has become his personal tour de force.

He has his faults. His characterization tends to be too generalized, his stage behavior occasionally undisciplined. And sometimes, in the fury of his involvement, his interpretation becomes overly mannered, his arms too soft and pretty. “I saw Rudi and Margot dance in Giselle one night,” says a male dancer, “and I couldn’t tell which was the ballerina.”

Beyond all that, Nureyev possesses a mysterious charismatic gift called presence. Callas has it. Richard Burton has it. It is an animal magnetism, an ineffable, extrasensory something that rivets all eyes on Nureyev, whether he is center stage or obscured in the shadows. Just standing still, he is an exclamation point.

Perfect Relation. Some of his presence has rubbed off on Fonteyn’s classical technique, lending a new tingle to her Picasso-like purity of line. “Something quite special happens when we dance together,” says Fonteyn. “It’s odd, because it’s nothing we’ve discussed or worked on, yet there in the photos both heads will be tilted to exactly the same angle, both in perfect geometric relationship to each other.”

In the artistic relationship of Nureyev and Fonteyn, he is the dominant force, amending, criticizing, suggesting. It comes naturally to him, just as his gifts for choreography do. His restaging of the Kirov’s full-length Raymonda was a pretty, sugar-spun spectacle and, along with Nureyev’s offstage antics, the roaring sensation of last year’s Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Last October he rechoreographed the Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake in Vienna. In his strong belief that “the Amazonian takeover” of the ballet has resulted in an appalling denigration of the male, Nureyev scissored Tchaikovsky’s music, jiggered dances, and virtually reworked every number until the dreamy fairytale prince emerged as a rip-snorting hero who dominated both the dance and drama.

The Tartar. Nureyev was in fact born in motion—on a train rattling across the icy stretches of Siberia. It was 1938, and his peasant mother was en route to visit his father, a soldier assigned to teach Communist doctrine to a Russian artillery unit stationed just then in Vladivostok. But Nureyev does not feel Russian. Both his parents, he proudly points out, are descendants of the “magnificent race of Bashkir warriors,” and therefore “I am Tartar, not Russian.” The Tartar temperament, he explains, is a “curious mixture of tenderness and brutality.”

With his father away on war duty, his mother moved in with her brother-in-law and another family in the town of Ufa on the dark steppes west of the Ural Mountains. Nureyev lived in one room with nine other people, including his three sisters. “My prevailing memory,” he says, “is one of hunger—consistent, gnawing hunger.” To get food, mostly goat cheese and potatoes, his mother peddled all of his father’s civilian clothes piece by piece—belts, suspenders, boots. “Daddy’s grey suit was really quite tender,” the children would say. Since he had no shoes, his mother had to carry him to school on her back, and since he had no overcoat, he had to wear his sister’s hand-me-down cape. Understandably, he became the class oddball, and a loner from the beginning.

When he was seven, one of the teachers taught him a few Bashkir folk dances, and he was soon touring the local hospitals with the school troupe. One night the Ufa Opera Ballet imported a name ballerina and, though he did not have the price of a ticket, Nureyev went by the theater determined somehow to get in. As fate would have it, the crush of the crowd was so great that the doors of the theater collapsed and in he went. It was the first ballet he had ever seen. “Watching the dancers that night,” he recalls, “I had the absolute certitude that I had been born to dance.”

Meanwhile, his teachers were besieging his parents with letters complaining about his incorrigible behavior at school: “He jumps like a frog and that’s about all he knows; he even dances on the staircase landings.” His father ordered him to give up dancing. He acquiesced, but invented excuses to slip away at night to neighboring villages to perform with a touring folk-dance group. The performances were held by the light of kerosene lamps on an improvised stage suspended between two trucks.

Broken Rules. At 15, Nureyev joined the Ufa Opera’s corps de ballet, saved his money, and a year later bought a one-way ticket to Leningrad to audition for the Kirov. Though by Russian standards he was about six years late in beginning his formal training, he was accepted for the Kirov’s ballet school. He immediately distinguished himself as its most brilliant and most unmanageable student, violated every curfew regulation, fought with his instructors. He lectured a teacher in front of the whole company on the evils of the Kirov’s “systematic wearing-down of the individual,” took private English lessons and read J. D. Salinger. He refused to join the Komsomol, a training group for the Communist Party. He was guilty of fraternizing with dancers from foreign touring companies. He was not being subversive, or even rebelling. Nureyev is totally apolitical. He simply wanted to see everybody and anybody who danced.

When the Kirov made its debut in Paris in 1961, a Soviet plainclothesman tailed Nureyev wherever he went. And he went everywhere, touring the city with French friends he had met. This brought more scoldings from the Kirov management, but Nureyev persisted. Then, when the company arrived at Le Bourget that June morning to fly to London, Nureyev was informed that he was to go instead to Moscow to dance in the Kremlin, and could rejoin the tour later. “Dance in the Kremlin indeed,” scoffs Nureyev in retrospect. “I knew this was a crisis. I was like a bird inside a net. A bird must fly, see the neighbor’s garden and what lies beyond.” So he flew.

The Team. Paris’ Marquis de Cuevas Ballet instantly hired Nureyev for $400 a week, more than he had made in six months with the Kirov. His mother, brought to Moscow by the government, called him every day on government orders and pleaded with him to come home. But, he says, he forever erased any thoughts of returning when, at his debut performance, the local Communists staged a raucous demonstration and scattered the stage with broken glass.

During his first year in the West, Nureyev was looking for a permanent home with one of the major companies. Most of all, he wanted to dance under Balanchine. But when a meeting was finally arranged, the great man said: “Rudolf, when you are tired of playing the prince, come to me.” Eventually Nureyev decided that Balanchine was exercising a “castrating influence” on the male dancer and said so publicly. That eliminated the New York City Ballet. Five months after his defection, Nureyev received an invitation from Margot Fonteyn to dance at her annual London charity gala. Both were so instantly taken with each other (“He is the first Russian I met who can make me laugh,” she said) that they decided to team up. They made their debut in February 1962 in Giselle, and the flame was lit.

Twist & Change. The dizzying suddenness of Nureyev’s arrival has left him, as a friend says, “like a mobile, changing with every twist of the wind.” Hardly a model of stability in the first place, his foul-weather moods have grown to gale intensity. While performing at the Spoleto festival last year, he was invited to an informal dinner party at Composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s home. When he arrived, he promptly ordered one of the guests to “get me a plate.” When the guest politely informed him that it was a serve-your-self proposition, he snorted: “Nureyev never serves himself! He is served!” With that, he smashed his whisky glass on the floor and stomped out. When the festival’s photographer wanted to take some publicity shots of Nureyev and Fonteyn, the tempestuous Tartar angrily planked himself down in a chair and growled: “I give you three minutes, photographer, and I start counting now.” Would Nureyev stand next to Fonteyn? “No, one minute gone.” Could he sort of lean toward her? “No, everyone leans toward Nureyev, two minutes gone . . .”

On balmier days he can be the very soul of wit and charm. During rehearsal breaks he will entertain Margot with a rubber-legged imitation of Charlie Chaplin. When a gushing teen-ager accosted him in a Soho pub recently and announced that she had drawn his face so many times she could see it in her dreams, Rudi purred: “You should draw your own face, it’s so much prettier.” Some nights, at the slightest insistence, he will drag Margot Fonteyn out on the dance floor at a post-performance party and thrill the guests with a torrid twist. Then the next night he will meet the same request with a sneering remark: “I’m not your performing bear.”

Little Habit. Friends who know him best endure his huffs with a weary smile, knowing that he will be back in the morning with gifts and apologies. To contain such moods, Nureyev finds that Scotch, “a little habit I picked up in the West,” is helpful. Charging out of a party for the Royal Ballet in Toronto two years ago, he decided to walk the white line in the center of the street back to his hotel. To the accompaniment of honking cars, he tried a few pirouettes. When a policeman suddenly appeared, he finished off with a high kick aimed at the cop’s head. He was handcuffed, dragged to the station, and later released without being charged.

He once ascribed his teeter-totter personality to his Tartar ancestry. Now he blames it all on Pisces. “I am Pisces,” he says, showing the gold Pisces medal he has been wearing around his neck since he took up astrology. “Very sexy, in love with love, crazy, loyal and disloyal, good and bad, lost in pools and oceans of green water.” And he is—a baffling maze of moods and manners. Now that he has shaken the shackles of the Kirov, he says he feels weak and alone. He sees conspiracies surrounding him. Of impresarios, he says: “You must remember that you are giving food to people who would gladly cut you up and eat you. It’s you who always pays. It’s those others who eat and go to bed early.”

He even suspects Fonteyn of dark plots. “Maybe,” he grimly ponders, “it’s that Margot has gained very much from this dancing with me, and me much, much less, until now I am sitting alone on the floor, tired and exhausted. Maybe it’s that she has taken from me because she wishes to be the one to survive.” Lest she forget, every year Nureyev reminds Margot that she has one less year to dance. Says Margot: “Rudolf is very mature artistically, although immature emotionally.”

Wobbly Ways. That this noble couple is given to such human emotions would shock many of their fans. Indeed, though many of their followers like to think otherwise, the rumors that the flames of romance that Rudi and Margot kindle onstage also rage offstage are false. Margot is married to Dr. Roberto (“Tito”) Arias, 46, former Panamanian Ambassador to Britain. Arias, who was shot by a political enemy in Panama last June, is paralyzed from the neck down, and Margot spends three hours on the train every day in order to visit him in the hospital in Buckingham shire, where he is being treated.

Nureyev would surprise most of his friends if he ever married anybody. He is loath to get involved with anything that interferes with his dancing. “Women are silly, every one of them,” he exclaims, “but stronger than sailors. They just want to drink you dry and leave you to die of weakness.” Marriage? “Why?” he says. “To ruin my life? To ruin some girl’s life?”

But for all his wobbly ways offstage, when it comes to his dancing, he is a man of steely dedication. He is a perfectionist, and has the arrogance of a perfectionist. Once, at a Kirov performance in France of Swan Lake, he slipped and fell in his first variation as the prince. Most dancers would have sheepishly carried on. Not Rudi. He stopped the orchestra, stalked offstage, rubbed rosin on his shoes and started all over again. He attends class every day without fail, will spend hours working on a step that is merely a preparation. Unlike some male virtuosos, who are notoriously bad partners and seem to be waiting only for the moment when they can show off their own wares, Nureyev is acclaimed by every ballerina he has ever danced with as a totally sympathetic partner, showing off his ballerina in their pas de deux with dedicated deference. Moreover, he has exercised a strong and significant hand in enriching the Royal Ballet’s repertory. His La Bayadere is the most recent Russian ballet of any substance to be adopted by a Western company. And he has made basic alterations in several other works, including Giselle and the Nutcracker adagio. If this is always aimed at enhancing the male role, a reasonable response is why not? Nearly all classical ballets are a pastiche of showpieces designed to display the talents of individual dancers. Nureyev can do more than most dancers, and he wants choreography that will allow him to prove it.

Still, all is not happy with the Royal Ballet. With all the brouhaha for Nureyev, some dancers feel ignored. Says one star dancer: “If Rudi doesn’t push off eventually, I’ve got half a mind to take my candle out from under this bushel.”

Funny Hair. Rudi is content right where he is. He likes London, partly because “nobody laughs at my hair.” (They laughed at it in Stuttgart, especially when he turned up at rehearsals one day wearing curlers.) His favorite picture is a closeup of his head which looks like Simba the lion in repose. A restless creature, he roams the streets late at night looking like some shabby fugitive, in his black wrap-around leather coat and Dutch-boy cap. Three or four nights a week he drops in at a private, after-hours Soho club called the Ad Lib, where he twists along with such fellow members as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Nobody laughs at anybody’s hair there.

Other nights he spends at the movies, laughing convulsively at the cartoons. His one abiding passion besides dancing is music. He has a collection of more than 4,000 records—Chopin, Bach, Callas arias, Scriabin, and every album Peggy Lee ever put out. He never travels anywhere without his portable phonograph. He plays the piano, can listen to almost any classical recording and tell who is conducting.

A creature of the night, he spends most afternoons lolling about his four-room furnished flat in London, playing records, sipping Scotch, chattering on the telephone, often with his good friend Erik Bruhn, who, he says, is “the only dancer who has anything to show me that I don’t already know.” He uses the phone like a postcard, calling dancer friends around the world, chitchatting in fluent, slightly accented English. When visitors arrive, he will emerge wearing high, tan moccasins, skintight, sky-blue pants and flowing fuchsia shirt. Scattered about the living room are effects that mark the mystery of the man —gilt-bound tomes of Balzac and Schiller next to a pile of toys that he amuses himself with: a soccer game, a Yo-Yo, a gun that shoots pingpong balls. And everywhere there are model train locomotives, which he collects in honor of his origin. He used his earnings of about $2,800 per performance to buy an $80,000 walled-in villa tucked away in the mountains above Monte Carlo, where he spends two or three months out of the year.

Hypnotic Moment. On the days of a performance, he falls into a semi-somnambulant state, eating little, seeing no one. “I am dying all the day,” he says sadly. In the late afternoon he packs his gear and drives off to the theater in his beige Mercedes 3205L, arriving two hours before curtain time. Then, swaddled in layer upon layer of sweaters, sweat pants, leggings and scarfs, he goes onto the deserted stage. After a long series of careful and precise unlimbering exercises, he runs through every step of the evening’s ballet in deep concentration, shedding clothing as he goes, until he reaches the point of exhaustion. Then he retires to his dingy dressing room and devotes a full hour to dressing and applying his makeup, painting his eyebrows heavy, black and fiercely catlike across his temples.

A few minutes before curtain time, he enters the wings and begins exercising again. Then, as the curtain ascends, his forehead glistening with sweat, his chest heaving, he steps out into a halo of white light. Turning slowly, deliberately, he fixes his enigmatic gaze on the audience for one hypnotic moment, then begins to dance. And, like the sound of the sea, there comes the great rushing gasp of an audience enchanted.