Reclaiming the Glory That Was Nureyev’s

Whether he’s in heaven, hell or the Kingdom of the Shades, Rudolf Hametovich Nureyev must be laughing sardonically. After all, for nearly the last 15 years of his ballet career, he did everything possible to destroy his reputation, dancing too often, too badly, eventually too unwatchably to be anything more than classical ballet’s grimmest joke. And yet, surprisingly, almost impossibly, his artistic rehabilitation is now in full swing, fed by new evidence that, if not the greatest dancer of our era, he may well have been the most original and influential.

Local audiences might need more convincing than balletomanes in Europe or New York because, starting in the mid-1970s, notoriously disastrous Nureyev performances on local stages began to outnumber the few glorious ones he gave here in his prime.

Remember him stumbling through the leading male role in “Raymonda” on the opening night of the American Ballet Theatre season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1976? He’d insisted on dancing despite a high fever from bronchial pneumonia and, after the resulting shambles, checked into a hospital. Classic Rudi.

Remember him the following year as an Albrecht who spent Giselle’s mad scene patting down his windblown coiffure and arranging his cape at the Greek Theatre in appearances with National Ballet of Canada? Or those progressively appalling “Apollo” tours in the late ‘80s that eventually led the Balanchine estate to deny him opportunities for further abuse? These were not exactly performances to treasure.

Indeed, long before his death in 1993 at age 54, Nureyev had become Exhibit A for some critics and fans of the corruption of artistry into self-parody, of stardom built on sand. And as it became increasingly difficult to remember when he had last danced acceptably, his whole career began to seem an artifact of media manipulation--as if all those headlines when he defected from the Kirov Ballet in 1961 had given Nureyev a 30-year free ride on world stages.

Against all odds, that perception is about to be overthrown, for no ballet dancer in history left a larger archive of films and videotapes--with some of the earliest and rarest now on view for the first time since the 1960s. This month, VAI home video will issue the four Nureyev telecasts from “The Bell Telephone Hour,” (1962-64, including his American debut), pairing him with Maria Tallchief, Lupe Serrano and, most memorably, Svetlana Beriosova in showpiece duets adapted from Petipa, Bournonville and Vaganova.

In addition, the two-night “This Is Nureyev!” film festival at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Friday and Saturday will include among later and more familiar fare a pair of films from 1965 and ‘66, shown on television in the years of their creation but never released theatrically. The former finds Nureyev in Spoleto, Italy, rehearsing and performing his staging of “Raymonda” with Margot Fonteyn, Doreen Wells and members of the Royal Ballet; the latter casts him opposite Zizi Jeanmaire in Roland Petit’s dance drama “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort.”

Nureyev had started his ballet training late, and his bloom was brief. In his mid-30s, his fabled technique began to erode alarmingly and his fabled expressive powers to warp into willful mannerism. But these glimpses of him in his 20s remind us of the beauty, brilliance and disarming, almost offhand arrogance he embodied at his peak, renewing his claim to greatness as they remind us of his limitations even then.

The unclassical hunched shoulders, the rough endings, the passages in the classics re-choreographed to give him more stage time and camouflage his shortcomings: These were hallmarks of Nureyev’s personal style as much as the heroic grandeur he achieved by emphasizing the sheer physical effort of ballet. Where traditionally the classical danseur noble made virtuosity look easy and elegant, Nureyev dramatized all the difficulties, and his triumph over them, to thrilling effect--and the thrills definitely are present in the VAI and LACMA clips, starting with three performances of the “Corsaire” pas de deux, shot in 1958, 1962 and 1965.

Of course, you could argue that all these performances have been superseded, technically and expressively. Watch the men’s trio just before the ball in the 1966 Royal Ballet “Romeo and Juliet” film (in the LACMA festival) and you’ll see young Anthony Dowell already outdancing Nureyev step for step. Rent the Hollywood melodrama “White Nights” and, under the opening credits, you’ll find Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing a radically condensed version of “Jeune Homme” with far greater emotional credibility than Nureyev could muster 10 years earlier.

However, rehabilitating Nureyev’s reputation isn’t a matter of pretending that time has stood still for ballet but rather rediscovering in his freshest, hottest, most unprecedented dancing the qualities that made him a phenomenon like no one and nothing since Anna Pavlova and the film “The Red Shoes.”

*

Begin by focusing on his quality of movement, something far different than how well or badly he executed particular steps, but rather his unique way of coloring the whole vocabulary. Inimitable and still unsurpassed, it represented a sensual, feline overlay on pure classicism and on the heroic athleticism mentioned earlier, proving particularly potent in all the shirtless, so-called Rudi-in-the-nudie vehicles he danced so often. There had been male heartthrobs in Anglo-American ballet before him--Dolin, Youskevitch, Somes, Bruhn, etc.--but none stripped as frequently or made male body sculpture as central to his image.

This innovation reflected the heady new freedoms of the 1960s, and it immediately reshaped the public’s expectations of an art form that had largely belonged to women for more than a century. Nureyev in “Corsaire” harem pants yearning for Fonteyn or in “Jeune Homme” jeans yearning for Jeanmaire may have reinforced the old Romantic stereotypes of the unattainable ballerina, but they also placed the passionate danseur in the center of the audience’s consciousness.

From there on out, the century would belong to male dancers, with every would-be phenom from Julio Bocca in ballet to Joaquin Cortes in flamenco to Michael Flatley in Irish step dancing eager not only to display bravura technique but also to perform shirtless and thus become a new incarnation of the archetypal, Nureyev-style dancing panther.

Unfortunately, not every physique benefits from exposure, and you can blame Nureyev’s influence for all the bare-chested string beans on dance stages these days. Blame him too for the sad spectacle of Charles Jude, his partner in many of those final, ghastly “Nureyev and Friends” tours of 1987 and ‘88, still trying to dance Apollo and Romeo in his late 40s “in tribute” to his dead master, as if self-indulgent miscasting were somehow a glorious artistic legacy.

We can also hold Nureyev responsible for initiating the tradition of what we might call choreographic blackmail--the ongoing practice of ballet stars demanding that companies who want them to dance provide them with chances to choreograph. Not just workshop opportunities, of course, but full-evening, big-budget projects that often represent the terpsichorean equivalent of vanity press publications.

Rehabilitating the reputation of Nureyev-as-choreographer may well be a lost cause given the amount of sheer crap still out there on film and video, but the LACMA festival is putting his best foot forward by showing a restored and digitally remastered print of his Australian Ballet production of “Don Quixote,” arguably his most artful creation. And next May, the Orange County Performing Arts Center will host the Paris Opera Ballet in his staging of “La Bayadere,” at the premiere of which he made his final public appearance in 1992.

It’s ironic. Dance is littered with Nureyev wannabes but, seven years after his death, the man himself is still news, still influential, still box office. But at least all the new/old footage of him proves that the Rudi phenomenon was no fluke or media hype, that for one glorious decade at least he was everything we always thought he was and then some.