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The Dancer Who Flew, A Memoir of Rudolf Nureyev, by Linda Maybarduk

Rudolf Nureyev's
Chinchilla Cape
 

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Talking to Lynda Lee-Potter

Daily Mail, Saturday, July 15, 1972

IN LONDON at four o'clock yesterday it was hot, sticky and humid.  People were sitting around in the sun at Covent Garden peeling peaches, lying back eating strawberries, with the shirt sleeves rolled up.  Inside the Royal Ballet rehearsal rooms, with 'Please enter silently' on the shabby door at the top of the rickety steps the heat was unbearable.
Nureyev, in long, thick, woollen grey tights and a grey singlet, his brown hair dripping with sweat, his face ashen with exhaustion, twisted Lyn Seymour up and up and round to the strange discordant music until she crashed in a great thud to the floor.
He wrenched away in exasperation and fury with Lyn and himself.
She lay on the floor, and the choreographer came to lift her up and gently press his fingers against her ribs.  Nureyev stood silently on his own and then turned back, compassionate at last, and put his arm around her.
Eyes closed
Later, as the rehearsal continued without him, he lay back with his eyes closed on the ramp at the back of the room with a vast towel round his damp  shoulders.
'If it is impossible I try to do it,' he said, 'but the body tells you when you cannot.  The body knows how to signal.
'It's trial and error, you use trial and error all the time.  You nag your body to find the strength.
'I get hurt, but I don't give in that easily.  I know the things that are wrong with me will not get better.  I must learn to dance with them.  It is very wrong to do that, but that's what I do.'
He sat looking very young and so worn out that it seemed almost too much effort to move out of the slight wooden upright chair he was sitting on.  It was easy to remember what Margot Fonteyn once said about him:  'To me he represents someone who over-fulfilled his natural talents.'
Later this month he will be dancing once more at the opera house with Fonteyn in Romeo and Juliet.
'When I dance with Margot,' he says, 'there is a lot of sentiment, and I am delighted.  We both worked for that kind of partnership.  I am glad it is rewarded. She gives me a lot, I give her a lot.   We help each other.
'I wish I had more courage to work harder, harder all the time.  When you are on stage you are frightened that your body will not follow your ideas.  You know what you want but your body will not always do it.'
It's difficult time for him.  He is creating a new role in Laborintus, a new ballet, and there is less than a fortnight before the world premiere at Covent Garden.  'If you recognise your talent,' he says 'it would be a waste of time not to use it.'  He uses his to the limits.  He pushes his body further and further, seeing where it will take him.
He's been plagued all his life with accidents; he tripped of a bus, he slipped on the ice, he has had an operation on his foot, yesterday he hurt his neck, but he has never never once thrown his hands up and given in.
He is a marvellous teacher, obsessional about perfection and terrifying if anybody seems to be slacking.
He is dancing and directing in Canada later this year, and he will be there with a critical eye and hectoring voice making sure that everything is done the way he wants it done.
He is an obsessional, fanatical worker. He works and works and practises because he believes he dances his best when he's exhausted.
He is self-protective to an abnormal degree, staring into space and saying bluntly: 'We won't answer that question' - particularly if anybody asks him about his mother and his two sisters, who are still in Russia.
Close contact
His mother hasn't seen him dance for 11 years, but they are in close contact.  She yearns to come to England to see him dance again, and at last there is a possibility that it might be arranged.
'We are working on it,' says her cautious, brilliant son. 'I cannot phone her because she hasn't got a telephone, but she rings me.  She goes to the station and books a call.'
They had been rehearsing since 12 without a break.  A vacuum flask of tea stood on the piano, and girls in blue and pink T-shirts to match their tights undid their buttons in the heat so that their bras showed.
Nureyev watched himself in the long practice mirror that lined one wall and wiped his face wearily with a towel.
'The rehearsal,' he said, 'has gone like rehearsals should go.  You find balance during rehearsal, you find how much strength you have.  You follow instinct all the time.
'We should work hard at everything we do.  I knew instinctively I would be a dancer when I was six years old.  It is strange, very strange to have that instinct.
'Now it is too late to be frightened of what I am.  People write things about me, they invented me a long time ago.  I live side by side with that, and I try to work.
'All my life, in the end, I have done what I want always.  Nothing is easy.  Work is difficult.
Long fight
'When we are in Canada I will have to choreograph, rehears, make sure the costume hems are not too long, not too short.  I have to be present for everything, at every detail.
'You try to fix things the best you can and only after long fight do you give in.  The main thing is convincing people not to go the easy way.  Nobody works on detail any more.
'It's the same with dancing.  You need to work at it too long, it needs everything.'