Guiding Their Steps

In the Salle Nureyev at the Palais Garnier on a recent afternoon, the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, dressed down in sweats and T-shirts, their faces bare and their tutus in the closet, rehearse scenes from Rudolf Nureyev’s “La Bayadere” for their upcoming West Coast tour.

It has been almost a decade since Nureyev ruled this studio as director of the Paris Opera--transforming the company with his restagings of Marius Petipa’s classics, teaching a generation of French dancers every elaborate Russian step. “La Bayadere” was Nureyev’s last production for the company. When it premiered in 1992, Nureyev, AIDS-stricken, watched from the wings, reclining on a couch.

While many of the company’s 150 dancers--whose average age is 25--never met the man (he died a few months after the “Bayadere” premiere), there are a few dancers whom Nureyev personally pushed, molded, mentored and made into stars in the Salle Nureyev today--his so-called veuves (widows) and enfants (children). To listen to them talk, it seems as if the real Phantom of the Opera is Nureyev himself.

“For me, he’s still in the studio,” says Isabelle Guerin, a 40-year-old etoile--”star,” the company’s highest rank. Guerin created the role of Nikiya in “La Bayadere” with Nureyev in 1992. “So I cannot cheat or cannot change something in case he’s somewhere and would say, ‘No, no!’ His voice is always here. For me it’s yesterday.”

“There isn’t a day where I don’t think of him,” says Manuel Legris, 36, whom Nureyev made an etoile at the age of 21 and who will dance the role of Solor tonight in Orange County. “I always think: ‘What would he have told me to do?’ Even though I didn’t always agree with him, and there were times when I detested him, he’s continued to guide my career.”

Nureyev became the Paris Opera Ballet’s director of dance in 1983 and stayed for seven years. Even after he stepped down, during the last two years of his life, he returned to the company to choreograph. Agnes Letestu, an etoile since 1997, was one of the last dancers Nureyev took under his wing.

“It’s like he’s still alive,” says Letestu, Nikiya in three Orange County performances. “I remember when he left as director, then came back. People would say, ‘Oh, the boss is back; the boss is in the house.’ He had such authority. He was a kind of tyrant--not in a bad way--it was a dictatorship, but always for the benefit of the dancers.”

The Paris Opera Ballet calls itself “the birthplace of classical dance,” and the Paris Opera Ballet School continues to turn out perfectly formed ballerinas each year.

While Nureyev’s repertory is now considered a national treasure at the Paris Opera, when he arrived, many Parisians were as shocked by his restaging of classic ballet as they were when the Eiffel Tower or the I.M. Pei pyramid went up.

“People weren’t happy at all,” says Legris. “The funny thing is that now, when people try to do other productions of classics, they get attacked.”

He also opened the company’s doors to the world’s leading contemporary choreographers, reflecting a global vision that is another signature of the company. Paris Opera Ballet commissions new works by choreographers such as Pina Bausch, Jiri Kylian, Maurice Bejart and Merce Cunningham. Anjelin Preljocaj’s “Le Parc,” for instance, a full-length contemporary ballet commissioned by the company in 1995, got twin billing with “La Bayadere” last week in San Francisco, while Southern California will only get a look at “La Bayadere.”

The company’s director of dance, Brigitte Lefevre, a former Paris Opera dancer who entered the company school at age 8, founded her own company in the 1970s and returned in 1995, says she was disappointed not to be able to show both sides of the company in Orange County, which last hosted it in 1988, in Nureyev’s “Cinderella.”

But she says she chose to present “La Bayadere,” with its lavish costumes and sets and tragic love story, because it “gives us a chance to show the spirit of la danse academique, the veritable science of classical dance,” she says, as well as to pay tribute to Nureyev, and “all that he represented as a dancer, as a person who loved dance and as one of the great personalities of his century.”

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Not every dancer thinks like a director or a choreographer, but from the moment he first danced the role of Solor in 1958, at the age of 20, in Leningrad with the Kirov Ballet, Nureyev began making mental notes.

By the time he immigrated to the West in 1961, he had added “Don Quixote,” “Giselle,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Swan Lake” and others to his repertory. And when he arrived, he mounted pieces of those great ballets with various companies. It was he who introduced the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire” to the rest of the world. He added solos--first as a vehicle for himself, and later for other star dancers--to “Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake.” He mounted the famous “Kingdom of the Shades” scene from “La Bayadere” in 1963 for London’s Royal Ballet, reviving it in 1974 for the Paris Opera Ballet.

When he mounted the full-length “Bayadere” in 1992, the program notes called it “one of the Kirov Ballet’s most precious but least known treasures, in a staging faithful to tradition but refracted through the eyes and thoughts of one of the greatest of that company’s sons.”

Ballet master Patrice Bart is a former etoile who joined the Paris Opera corps de ballet in 1960. He worked with Nureyev to stage the premiere of “La Bayadere” in 1992 and today is largely responsible for teaching Nureyev’s version to the new generation of dancers. “I try to conserve the personality and force that he gave to the productions and in particular ‘La Bayadere,’ which is in a way his legacy to us,” he said.

Bart believes that the company was losing direction when Nureyev arrived. “We really needed a figure to follow,” he says. “Rudolf had a very strong direction, very strong taste, and he really took everyone [with] him. He was so demanding for himself, there was no question the dancers behind him would not be working as hard as he was working himself. The company was reborn when he arrived.”

If those who worked with Nureyev can vouch for his ability to talk them into anything and claim they can recite every minute instruction by heart, those who never met the legendary figure sometimes need to be persuaded. Nureyev’s intricate choreography calls for more steps than usual within a given musical phrase, and creates strict paths of movement so demandingly laid out that dancers who try to cheat have been known to simply fall down.

“We have to be very convincing for the people who never worked with Rudolf,” Bart explains, “to make them understand why it’s like this more than like that. This takes time, sometimes more time than just doing the steps.”

Nureyev himself wasn’t always big on explanations. Says Bart: “He’d say ‘I want this. Dance, don’t talk.’ It was terrible sometimes. You had to wait a bit and then you’d come back to the subject and sometimes you’d never get the right answer.

“You have to find the reason he wanted this, so then you can explain. I don’t believe in forcing people. You have to try to convince them.”

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The Nureyev repertory constitutes about one-fourth of the season at the Paris Opera Ballet. “One of the reasons I continue to mount those ballets is because I know I still have people like Patrice Bart,” Lefevre says. “I also kept those ballets for them. It’s a generation that received a lot from Rudolf. So I’m happy to recognize that.”

It is Guerin’s last season with the Paris Opera Ballet, which requires female dancers to leave at age 40, men at 45.

“Nureyev is in my body, but I am myself,” she says, trying to explain his impact and its repercussions--the way dance is passed on body to body, the way dancers live on. “And I can be myself because of him. Because he taught me to trust myself. I don’t need anybody else.”

When you ask those who work at the Paris Opera Ballet if they can imagine a day when Nureyev is not the house’s guiding spirit, they mostly draw a blank.

“When I’m gone and when Brigitte Lefevre is gone, maybe it will be something different,” Bart says. “But we kept his productions because they were so strong and so beautiful. He transformed the company, and we must keep it that way until somebody as strong as him, and as important as him, would lead us.”

* “La Bayadere,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m. $20-$85. (714) 556-2787..