NUREYEV AND HIS PARISIANS: FALLEN IDOLS AT THE MET

Ah, Paris. The City of Light and l’amour . The city of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. The city of the Arch of Triumph and Notre Dame. The city of the Seine and the Opera, of ballet and Rudolf Nureyev. . . .

Rudolf Nureyev?

In case you’ve been out of the universe, you may not know that France has been very busy saluting America this month. There seem to have been a few duo-nationalistic quasi-aquatic celebrations around here involving the renovation of some kitschy statue of a lady with a torch, an erstwhile gift from Old Gaul to the New World.

For the intrepid balletomane, however, the crucial action entailed no symbols, no boats, no tight little island, no fireworks in the sky--just human pyrotechnics on a stage. The balletic action took place at the Metropolitan Opera House for two weeks starting July 8, with a coda of unreasonable “Swan Lake” facsimiles following in Washington.

The demonstrations in question weren’t just ordinary, everyday, garden-variety human pyrotechnics, of course. They were the elegantly showy pyrotechnics executed by the Paris Opera Ballet--specifically, the Paris Opera Ballet as directed and dominated by the aging Westernized-Russian idol nearly everyone calls Rudi.

Ballet has been a crucial fixture of Parisian culture since the periodically palmy days of Louis XIV. It was Paris that oversaw the historic birth of “Giselle” in 1841. With varying degrees of hospitality, Paris has fostered the art of Taglioni, Saint-Leon, Petipa, Fokine, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Massine, Balanchine, Lifar, Bejart, Petit and, in recent years, a short but imposing list of modernists.

Ballet in Paris, like many another thing in Paris, has often been stirred by multilayered intrigue, intrusive politics, internal jealousies and rivalries, arch-chauvinism and arch-conservatism, the stultifying vagaries of the civil-service system, egomaniacal leadership, financial crises, inferiority complexes and, even worse, superiority complexes.

America saw the Paris Opera Ballet, fleetingly and not too memorably, in 1948. Two projected return visits in the 1980s became last-minute abortions. Now, thanks to generalized patriotic fervor, enlightened managerial maneuvering at the Met, widespread dance euphoria, and the box-office appeal of the Tartar at the top, the Paris Opera Ballet has finally conquered Fun City.

After a fashion.

Despite a barrage of initially passionate endorsements in the leading New York papers, the press has been, as they say, mixed. Although audiences have been sometimes polite and sometimes ecstatic, an alert ear could identify boos amid the bravos.

There can be little doubt that the visiting Parisians made an impact on a sweltering, blase metropolis that adores chic new attractions and itinerant heroes. The Paris Opera Ballet definitely was the thing to see this summer, and, perhaps more important, it afforded a great place to be seen.

Beginning with with a mindless, endless, gosh-we’re-wonderful gala benefit that reunited Mikhail Baryshnikov and Nureyev onstage for an instant, the Met performances attracted a generous number of movie stars, socialites, politicos, show-biz chieftains and supergroupies, not to mention a first-night First Lady who actually garnered a few iconoclastic boos of her own.

When the brouhaha and the goo and the gush finally began to settle, the cooler heads in attendance dared suggest that all was not quite perfect even in pirouetting Paris.

No one could doubt that the company enlisted some splendid, genuinely stellar dancers--they are, in fact, officially labeled etoiles in this minutely structured ensemble. One had to be more than star-struck, however, to overlook the often ragged corps, the initially horrendous orchestra, the threadbare export repertory, and, most disturbing, the embarrassing self-indulgences displayed by the once-mighty Nureyev, both as danseur and as choreographer.

Most of the 16 official etoiles did indeed glitter with reasonable brilliance. Their number was increased to 17, incidentally, when the young Manuel Legris was dramatically elevated from sujet to etoile status during an unexpected post-performance ceremony. Still, some stars glittered more brilliantly than others.

The preordained audience favorite among the women was Sylvie Guillem--21, blond, relatively tall, very long-limbed, and the charming mistress of magnificently freakie 180 extensions.

She danced with breezy suavity in Nureyev’s one-act “Raymonda” hodgepodge, with sweeping eloquence and somewhat erratic technique in Nureyev’s “Swan Lake” perversion, and with arching poignancy and perfectly muted virtuosity in the role Balanchine created for Tamara Toumanova in “Le Palais de Cristal,” a.k.a. “Symphony in C.”

New York clasped her instantly to its collective bosom, much as Los Angeles had embraced the equally obscure Altynai Assylmuratova on the recent Kirov tour. There are dancers, after all, and there are ballerinas. It doesn’t take a trained eye to know the difference at first sight.

That Patrick Dupond turned out to be the most arresting of the men could have been no surprise. He has appeared here with other companies and, at 27, is a firebrand in international demand (so much in demand that, on the eve of the U.S. tour, he broke his etoile ties with Paris and negotiated a limited guest-contract).

New York blew adoring kisses as he flew through a dazzlingly precise and dazzlingly vulgar “Corsaire” pas de deux with Guillem, as he tried desperately to validate the dated cliches of Serge Lifar’s “Les Mirage,” and as he glamorously dominated the third movement of the “Palais de Cristal.”

He remained conspicuously and oddly--well, perhaps not so oddly--absent from Nureyev’s male-oriented “Swan Lake.”

It should surprise no one that Nureyev at 48 is but a mere shadow of his former self. Everyone seems to know that, except Nureyev. He now lumbers where he used to soar. Every step bespeaks effort, every lift invites danger. It is sad.

Even sadder is the realization that the celebrated Nureyev persona has faded along with the celebrated Nureyev bravura. Even when he has to do little but stand still and exude authority, he now tends to stand still and exude exhaustion, or, worse, disorientation.

When it comes to making dances, as opposed to dancing dances, the Nureyev of ’86 is more to be censured than pitied. His “Raymonda” collage (abruptly truncated after opening night) follows a valued tradition for most of the solos but drives the corps crazy with fussy, busy, complex, incoherent, contrapuntal steps in the ensembles.

Similar distortions mar the group rituals in “Swan Lake.” At the second performance, two overworked dancers fell down, and it wasn’t their fault.

Frenzied courtiers, alas, turned out to be the least of the problems here. More damaging, by far, was Nureyev’s restructuring of the romantic masterpiece as a naively Freudian dream play in which the mother-pecked Prince gets to do a lot of dancing unimagined by Petipa and Ivanov and is tormented by a sexually ambiguous tutor who doubles as the evil, all-powerful, wing-flapping Rothbart.

At most performances, Nureyev hogs the stage as the heretofore incidental villain. Occasionally, he ventures the heroic platitudes of the Prince. Poor Odette and her swans, in any case, become mere figments of the hero’s feverish imagination.

Nureyev’s revamping of “Swan Lake” proved pretentious and silly. Small wonder the sophisticated Parisians on both sides of the proscenium protested it and petitioned, successfully, for a return to the old-fashioned Bourmeister staging.

Nureyev’s virtually all-new ballet, “Washington Square,” wasn’t just pretentious and silly. It turned out to be an unmitigated aesthetic disaster and, more damaging, a bore. Even some of Rudi’s most loyal admirers joined in the catcalls.

This choreographic aberration represents a shotgun marriage fusing Henry James’ austere story of thwarted love, betrayal and repression with the gutsy, ear-stretching musical Americana of Charles Ives. Apparently misunderstanding both the writer’s psychological impulses and the composer’s experimental flourishes, Nureyev has assembled a bizarre mishmash of simple-minded, picturesque, contradictory cliches.

Inside Cathy’s house, the protagonists enact suggestions of internal strife in incomprehensible mime and showy pas de deux routines rife with mementos of Tudor, Ashton and De Mille.

Outside, the red-white-and-oh-so-blue corps parades by in a nightmare assembly of cliche routines populated by prancing pioneers, slinking Miss Liberty sirens, strutting Civil War soldiers, shuffling cowboys and, most offensive, smirking black-face slaves.

Oh, the humanity of it all.

The dancing at the first performance, led by Jean Guizerix, Moniques Loudieres, Laurent Hilaire and Isabelle Guerin, reflected dedication as well as savoir-faire. Donald Johanos, the American conductor, served Ives nobly in the pit. The sets of Antoni Taule and costumes of Nicholas Georgiadis strove to be atmospheric.

Still, it was a hopeless cause.

The non-Nureyev ballets on the New York agenda could offer little consolation, apart from “Le Palais de Cristal.” Balanchine’s ballet has undergone various revisions, both in Paris and in New York, since its Paris premiere in 1947. However, the basic outlines--marvelously intricate, marvelously musical--remain familiar.

One could regret that the Parisians left Leonor Fini’s ornate set at home. Still, one had to admire in the surprisingly ornate yet eminently fluid dancing.

“Lully: Quelques Pas Graves de Baptiste” turned out to be a mock 17th-Century yawn marathon staged by Francine Lancelot in which a white-wigged, silver-clad Nureyev struck pseudo-Baroque poses, executed small and prim Baroque-flavored steps, luxuriated in relentlessly arty stylization and pretended to invoke quaint Sun-King platitudes.

Lifar’s “Les Mirages,” a corny, ultra-literal fairy-parable dating back to the dark ages of 1947, can sustain nostalgic appeal only for those who like literal storytelling, mawkish sentiment and neatly cliched dancing accompanied by thick, lush and cheap music. The music, in this case, is by Henri Sauguet.

They don’t make ballets like this anymore. Thank goodness.

It may be worth noting, by the way, that at one performance the management reversed the order of “Lully” and “Les Mirages” on the program without informing the audience. No one seemed to notice. Or care.

It also may be worth noting that a brand-new and emphatically successful satire by Maurice Bejart called “Arepo” (“Opera” spelled backwards) had been promised as part of the New York repertory. Unfortunately, Bejart and Nureyev had a falling-out, and “Arepo” fell out with it. The management offered no explanations and no apologies--just dubiously compensatory “Raymondas.”

Perhaps next time.