Legends Nureyev, Gillespie Die : Defector Was One of Century’s Great Dancers

Rudolf Nureyev, generally accepted as the most stunning male dancer of the 20th Century, famous for his extraordinary, catlike leaps and his singular political leap to freedom, died Wednesday in Paris.

He was 54 and those who had seen him in the past several months said his sinewed body had been wasted by what was widely accepted as AIDS, although Nureyev denied that he had the disease.

His doctor, Michel Canisi, said:

“Mr. Nureyev died today (Wednesday) in Paris from cardiac complications following a devastating illness. Following Mr. Nureyev’s wishes, I can’t say any more.”

Asked as long ago as 1987 if he had the disease, Nureyev snapped: “No, no, that’s not true. . . . Obviously, it’s wrong. . . . I’m alive, I’m very well, I don’t have any AIDS. It doesn’t bother me.”

But it became obvious a year or more ago that his health was failing.

On Oct. 8, in his last appearance on stage for the Paris premiere of his choreography of “La Bayadere,” he looked gaunt and had to be helped to walk. He blinked back tears as the audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation.

Funeral services, probably in Paris, are pending.

Nureyev became an international performer after defecting from the Soviet Union in Paris in 1961. He danced with more than 16 ballet companies around the world, lived in London, Paris and elsewhere and in 1982, officially became a citizen of Austria, the first foreign country in which he danced.

“I do not miss my home, and I rarely think of my family or of the past,” he said two years after his defection in Paris. “I love my mother, I sometimes talk to her on the telephone. . . . But the old life means very little to me and I push all such thoughts away.

“I have never regretted that I chose to leave Russia,” he said. “To me, a country is just a place to dance in.”

Trained by Russia’s elite Kirov Ballet, Nureyev situated himself in the West as “permanent guest artist” of England’s Royal Ballet. His finest work was partnering Britain’s preeminent ballerina, the late Dame Margot Fonteyn. His favorite role was Albrecht in “Giselle” when she danced the title role.

Like Fonteyn, Nureyev danced into his 50s, far longer than most ballet stars. He was known for his undisciplined lifestyle and compulsion to dance, and he refused to stop performing when other dancers would have given up. When dancing became too difficult even for his self-determination, he found a new way to retain fame--conducting the orchestra.

“For this man,” Times dance writer Lewis Segal wrote in 1987, “leaving the spotlight is the same thing as death.”

Nureyev, who also choreographed and directed ballets, was known to a generation for his agility, including the panther leaps and the impression he gave of pausing suspended in midair; for his highly expressive acting, and for the deep musical understanding that eventually led him to conducting. He also possessed an uncanny memory, which enabled him to dance a role after seeing it once, an ability that simplified his appearances with so many different ballet companies.

“When I am dancing with him, and I look across the stage,” Fonteyn said, “I do not see Nureyev, a man I know and talk to every day. I see the character of the ballet, for he is absorbed in his role.”

Martha Graham, who choreographed “Lucifer” for Nureyev and Fonteyn in 1975, once said: “He dares anything. His body is not typed. He is trained to be a cavalier in ballet but if he wants to be something else, he is a Tartar. It is a primal body, so controlled, so known.”

His fame spread far beyond the world of dance. He was lionized as a celebrity, people wrote about his Beatle-style haircut, his eccentric clothes and his intensity about his art.

Although many from an older generation would argue that Vaslav Nijinsky was Nureyev’s equal or superior, the diminutive Soviet dancer died before the advent of television and other forms of mass entertainment, depriving much of the world of his talent and showmanship. And Mikhail Baryshnikov, Nureyev’s contemporary, was probably less celebrated because he was a later political defector.

Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer remembered that “when Rudolf Nureyev first burst upon the West, his bravura flights and brooding, charismatic personality virtually obliterated everyone else on the stage--including the ballerina (for a time, Margot Fonteyn remained the noble exception). As the years--and decades--passed, and as age began to take an inevitable toll on his body, he became increasingly egocentric and increasingly mannered.

“At his lofty best, he was a serious, probing artist. At his willful worst, he could be infuriatingly narcissistic. Even at his worst, however, he all but dared the viewer not to watch him and, by inference, not to love him.

“George Balanchine always insisted that ballet is woman. Rudolf Nureyev changed that perception.”

Presaging his nomadic professional life, Rudolf Hametovich Nureyev was born on a train near Irkutsk on March 17, 1938, as his mother and three sisters were traveling to meet his soldier father at Vladivostok.

“It makes me feel that it was my destiny to be cosmopolitan,” Nureyev stated in an autobiography he wrote at the age of 24 in order to earn money after his defection.

His parents, both of Tatar descent, first settled in a small home in Moscow. They left after it was bombed during World War II. The family moved to Ufa in the state of Bashkira.

The Nureyevs were very poor, and “Rudi” painfully remembered being carried to kindergarten on his mother’s back because he had no shoes. He had to wear his sister’s coat for lack of his own, and one day fainted in class because he had not eaten.

His classmates taunted him in Tatar: “We have got a bump in our class.” Bump meant “beggar.”

The family shared a small room with two other families and lived mostly on potatoes.

“The first images of early childhood for me,” Nureyev wrote in the 1963 autobiography, “are of an icy, dark and, above all, hungry world.”

At 7, young Nureyev learned some Russian folk dances and happily danced and sang every afternoon. A year later, he saw his first ballet when his mother obtained a single ticket and somehow wedged herself and her four children into the theater. He glimpsed his future.

“From that unforgettable day when I knew such rapt excitement, I could think of nothing else; I was utterly possessed,” he said in the autobiography. “From that day I can truthfully date my unwavering decision to become a ballet dancer. I felt ‘called.’ Watching the dancers that night, admiring their ‘out of this world’ ability to defy the laws of balance and gravity, I had the absolute certitude that I had been born to dance.”

Nureyev described that first theater with its soft lights, gleaming chandeliers and velvet draperies as “another world, a place which, to my dazzled eyes, you could only hope to encounter in the most enchanted fairy tale.”

“Something was happening to me which was taking me far from my sordid world and bearing me right up to the skies,” he wrote. “From the moment I entered that magic place I felt I had really left the world, borne far away from everything I knew by a dream staged for me alone. . . . I was speechless.”

A member of the Communist Young Pioneers from age 10 to 16, Nureyev learned other folk dances and then met an elderly Ufa woman he knew only as Udeltsova, who had been in the Kirov. She gave him his first ballet lessons.

As a teen-ager, Nureyev was given walk-on roles with the Ufa Ballet.

“I felt I was walking with wings on my feet,” he later wrote.

He also taught folk dances to other children, and with the money earned for that and the walk-ons, he explored Moscow for three days. The Ufa Ballet offered him a permanent position, but he rejected that because he wanted to go to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and study for the Kirov.

On another trip to Moscow, with a folk-dancing troupe, Nureyev auditioned for the Bolshoi Ballet and was accepted. But he rejected that opportunity, too, because the Bolshoi had no residential school and he could not have afforded a place to live.

Still possessed with Udeltsova’s tales of the Kirov, Nureyev used his last Ufa earnings for a one-way ticket to Leningrad. He had no doubt that he would be accepted.

Arriving a week before classes began, Nureyev stayed with a friend of his Ufa teacher and explored Leningrad. When he auditioned and won acceptance by the Kirov’s residential Leningrad Ballet School on Aug. 25, 1955, he was already 17, considered an advanced age for dancers. His auditioner, a man named Costravitskaya, said bluntly: “Young man, you’ll either become a brilliant dancer or a total failure. And most likely you’ll be a failure!”

Nureyev refused to be dissuaded and soon took on the school’s director, Chelkhov, about the grade level in which he was placed. Chelkhov taught the sixth level where Nureyev began, and Nureyev wanted an upgrade to eighth, which he needed in order to avoid the military draft. He got it, and came under the purview of the legendary teacher Alexander Pushkin.

He told Newsweek magazine in 1963 that “I approached dancing from a different angle (from those who began intensive dance studies at age 8 or 9). Those who have studied from the beginning never question anything. For me, purity of movement wasn’t enough. I needed expression, more intensity, more mind.”

After only three years of study, the budding ballerino had three offers. Unsurprisingly, he chose the Kirov. As unusual as entering the ballet school at 17, Nureyev also defied convention by winning a soloist position at 20, bypassing any experience in the ballet corps.

The Young Pioneers were all the Communism Nureyev could bear, and despite his father’s protests, he refused to join the Komsomol and avoided politics as much as possible. But decades after he defected to the West, Nureyev continued to insist he fled Russia seeking artistic rather than political freedom.

Exhausted after a stressful bout with officials who said he must go to Ufa and dance with its ballet company to repay them for his schooling, Nureyev tore a ligament while performing. The Kirov doctor predicted he would be unable to work for two years. But Pushkin, whom Nureyev regarded as a father, moved him into his home and in three weeks had him working again.

Nureyev, with his independent ways and fiery temper, continued to aggravate Communist officials. He danced with the troupe in Vienna and liked very much what he saw of the West. When foreign groups performed in Moscow or Leningrad, he attended, despite being criticized by Russian police for having “foreign friends.”

After another tour to Berlin and East German cities and more fraternizing with foreigners, Nureyev was told that he could never leave Russia again and that he could not dance for any Communist officials. But he managed to do both--performing before Nikita S. Khrushchev and traveling with the Kirov to Paris on May 11, 1961.

But after a week’s performances in Paris, Nureyev was told that he could not continue to London and that he had to return--alone--to Moscow for discipline because of his “insubordination and dangerous individualism.”

Recognizing that directive as his professional death knell, Nureyev made his decision to defect at Le Bourget Airport, literally jumping into the arms of French authorities.

Aided by a foreign friend named Clara who enlisted two French inspectors, Nureyev, in his own words: “made it--in the longest, most breath-taking leap of my whole career I landed squarely in the arms of the two inspectors. ‘I want to stay,’ I gasped. ‘I want to stay!’ ”

Under French law, before signing a request for a “sanctuary permit,” a defector had to be placed in a room alone and given five minutes to weigh his decision. Russian officials tried to interfere without luck.

“Then there was silence. I was alone,” Nureyev wrote two years later. “Four white walls and two doors. Two exits to two different lives. For me this was already a return to dignity--the right to choose, the right I cherish most of all, that of self-determination.

“As the Russian saying goes: a young man lives on hope alone,” Nureyev wrote. “I made my way into the inspectors’ office. My new life had begun.”

His luggage and dearest possessions went to London without him--a collection of ballet shoes and leotards from everywhere he had danced, a made-to-order Parisian wig for his role in “Giselle” and an electric train purchased in Paris as the symbol of a lifelong love of trains.

Once in the West, Nureyev never wanted for work. He was immediately signed to a six-month contract with the International Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas. But after performances in France, Italy and Israel, he became disappointed with the company artistically and chose not to renew his contract.

While visiting Erik Bruhn, a famous Danish dancer who became his close friend, Nureyev got a call in Copenhagen from Fonteyn inviting him to appear in a benefit gala in England.

On Nov. 2, 1961, Nureyev made his London debut at a benefit for the Royal Academy of Dancing. He danced the Black Swan pas de deux with Rosella Hightower and a solo designed specifically for him by Frederick Ashton to the music of “Poeme Tragique.”

For a time, Nureyev toured with an independent group consisting of himself, Bruhn, Hightower and Sonia Arova.

He made his U.S. television debut partnering Maria Tallchief early in 1962 on the “Bell Telephone Hour.” His U.S. stage debut followed with the Ruth Page Opera Ballet in Chicago that March. Nureyev debuted in Los Angeles in 1963, with Britain’s Royal Ballet opposite Fonteyn at the Shrine Auditorium.

His magic partnership with Fonteyn had begun with “Giselle” in London in February, 1962. New York Times critic Clive Barnes, who dubbed Nureyev “ballet’s first pop star,” hailed the event as “the birth of the most celebrated ballet partnership of the 20th Century, perhaps even of all time.”

Almost a generation younger than Fonteyn, Nureyev was credited with rejuvenating her career. When they premiered “Marguerite and Armand,” which Ashton choreographed especially for them, they took 20 curtain calls. The London Times raved about Nureyev as “an Armand of wild dreams, fierce authority and depths of feeling the choreographer can plumb but not fully chart.”

Nureyev danced his directorial debut with the “Kingdom of the Shades” from “La Bayadere” at the royal Opera House in Covent Garden in November, 1963. His new career as producer and coach lay ahead, culminating in his post as artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet, which he held for seven years. He regarded the Paris post as a “natural progression,” but expressed real disappointment that he was never made director of England’s Royal Ballet.

Trained in Russian classic ballet, Nureyev was always eager to try new steps and roles. He studied American modern dance with Graham, dancing her “Lucifer” and “The Scarlet Letter.”

Although Nureyev frequently had trouble with his ankles, he was known for dancing despite injury or illness, earning the nickname “Rudolph Neveroff.”

As he aged, critics and fans reluctantly suggested that perhaps his time as a ballerino was past.

“I don’t think it is fair that a dancer should just be pushed aside when he still has something to offer,” he fumed in a memoir, “Aspects of the Dancer,” written when he was 49. “When someone has devoted his life to the stage, I think that as an artist he should be given the right to die onstage too.”

Nureyev tried dancing character parts for awhile, but did not particularly enjoy them. He was also less than thrilled with his reception in the Broadway musical “The King and I.”

“I dance or my body crumbles,” he said at the age of 52, shortly after he traveled to Russia to dance with the Kirov for the first time since his defection.

Nureyev tried acting in films, but without significant results, particularly a little noticed 1977 film biography of “Valentino.”

Music had saved his sanity during his harsh childhood, and music rescued him again toward the end of his career.

Many internationally known conductors had instructed him, even as they conducted music for his dancing. One of his teachers was Varujan Kojian, music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony and former assistant conductor and concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

After studying in Europe, Nureyev made his U.S. orchestra conducting debut in May, 1992, conducting for the American Ballet Theater’s “Romeo and Juliet” at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House.

“This (conducting) is something I’ve been preparing to do for many years, not some sudden impulse,” he told The Times in 1991. “It gives me the same kind of thrill I had when I was very young.”

“There is this wonderful illusion that the music they transmit comes out of you,” he said. “It’s enough to make a person euphoric.”

AN APPRECIATION: Times dance critic Martin Bernheimer remembers Nureyev’s charisma and dazzling technique. F1

Comments by Nureyev

Some quotes from interviews with Rudolf Nureyev, who died Wednesday in Paris:

“This (conducting) is something I’ve been preparing to do for many years, not some sudden impulse. . . . There is this wonderful illusion that the music they transmit comes out of you. It’s enough to make a person euphoric.”

--Los Angeles Times, 1991

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“I couldn’t live without it (dance). I’m born to be onstage and I dare say it shows. Margot (Fonteyn) said that real life comes when she’s on stage. I absolutely agree.”

--New York Daily News, 1986

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“For myself, the moment I am on the stage, things become multiplied and magnified. It’s like having an atom reactor inside of me. There is a chain reaction and, suddenly, my whole body bursts into flames.”

--New York Times, 1970

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“I have no country. For me a country is just a place to dance. Your roots are your work. Work is sacred.”

--Newsweek, 1965

Source: Times wire services