The Australian
Women's Weekly
December 23, 1970
by Martha Lear
Excerpts from
Pages 29, 36 and 39
The following website introduces three photographers and their
photographs of Nureyev in "Ropes of Time.".
Photographers - Rudolf Nureyev Photos
National
Library of Australia Picture Catalog - Walter Stringer collection of dance
slides - Rudolf Nureyev in Diana and Actaeon, 1964
Fashions for him
Blass in Businessman Bag
by Bill Cunningham
NEW YORK - Bill Blass men's styles are a devilishly exciting
mixture, a perfect fashion formula to please the middle-aged
businessman who wants to look dashing without becoming a fashion
freak.
Blass combines the look of the tasteful rich rebellious type dressed
in suede and fur with its alter ego, that of a debonair,
sophisticated older pinstripe English gentleman about town.
This is the Blass magic that puts his fashion offering on the top
level, provided you slipcover yourself in the total look.
The Blass show was held in the Grand Foyer of Lincoln Center's
Philharmonic Hall to accommodate nearly 1,000 spectators with an
advanced look of next winter's styles.
Blass' expensive, tasteful country squire raunchy look for city boys
coordinates a tobacco suede shirt, cuffs rolled above the elbow, a
wine-colored turtleneck and brown-beige-black Yeoman goat fur
trousers tucked into suede boots, plus a rakish Russian sable hat
cocked over one eye.
Masculine Bravado
This look was reminiscent of Harper's Bazaar's photo last
season of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev. The way Blass
mixes texture and color gives the whole artful expression masculine
bravado. |
|
Let me tell
you about my 20 minutes with Rudolf Nureyev, World's Greatest Dancer.
...for six weeks he had been dancing at the Metropolitan Opera House in
his annual New York appearance with England's Royal Ballet.
Practicing each morning, rehearsing each afternoon, performing most nights
- not an easy life. In three days he was leaving for a strenuous
European tour. And into these days his managers had crammed two -
two! - Press interviews, which he hates (he had granted none in the past
two years), and he had had it up to here. He had been threatening to
cancel both. And this very morning a glum press-agent had called to
report: "Rudi says, "No, no, no, no, no!' That is an exact quote.
So why not come to his dressing-room before tonight's performance and
we'll see..."
... for Nureyev is known to be a perambulating dynamite stick just looking
for a match.
Only the week before
he had strode off the stage of the Met in the middle of a pas de deux,
leaving the ballerina to her own unhappy devices for a full 30 seconds
before he returned, quite as inexplicably, and took up where he'd left
off. Later he explained: "Everything was terrible. Me,
tempo, everything. I thought, my God, I cannot continue like
this. So I held up hand to conductor, to make him understand that I
wish to stop and begin again. But he did not understand. So I
have to come back and continue."
The incident had caused a scandal in the ballet world.
How could Rudi do such a dreadful thing? What an exhibitionist!
What a temper! But his fans defended him passionately. "I'm in
awe of the courage it took," one said. "You must understand, Rudi
is his work. So when the work isn't going well, it's his life
that isn't going well."
Did I say fans? Other ballet dancers have fans;
Nureyev has disciples. When he dances in New York, he is followed
down the street like a 1940's movie idol...
He is besieged with invitations to all the right
parties - Jackie's in New York, sister Lee's in London, and such and so.
(Mrs. Onassis is a long-time friend, and this season visited him several
times back stage with her children.) Famous people send him
champagne and homemade borsch. I am not sure about the borsch, but
Nureyev likes champagne a lot...
The dressing room door opened and in
burst this - energy mass. A preposterous pair of leg warmers,
bulky-knit and blood-red, suspended across his bare chest. His hair
a wilderness encroaching upon his face. And the face itself a finely
sculptured enigma, poised to smile, poised to scream, and sending off
green-eyed sparks to spare. Thirty-two - is he really? He
looks a decade younger. How do you do? How do you do?
...
... Nureyev groaned like a dying man; then he turned to his
mirror and began applying make-up, fingers working so fast they were
almost blurred. Look, I said (meaning it), if I were he, I wouldn't
tolerate this interruption just before a performance. Nureyev peeked
cautiously through the mirror. But since he originally had
agreed to tomorrow's interview -
Suddenly he whirled and eyed me pleadingly, helpless as
a fox. "Listen, what can I talk to you about? Why must
I entertain you and all these people?" - flinging an arm
toward nameless hordes. "I want only to do my work."
No need to entertain me, I said.
"Oh, yes, I must. Always, always, always.
My God, I go crazy. Three days I leave to Italy. So much
things to do. Visa problem, packing problem, this problem, that
problem. Chee-sus Ch-rr-ist. I go crazy."
It sounded awful, I said. But about tomorrow?
"Chee-sus. Tomorrow. In morning is
practice, class. Then fashion fitting for 'Harper's Bazaar'
magazine. Fashion fittings! You cannot imagine what terrible
business this is. Then business lunch. Then... Anyway,
what we talk about?"
Why, uh, anything at all.
"No! Tell me subject!"
Oh, dear. Well, when he first cam to New York, he
had said...
"Agh-hh! Terrible! You tell me something I
have said seven years ago and you want to know if it is true. How do
I remember? What I said? What I said?
So I took the plunge. He had made some comment, I
said, about the dance's being a fine way to work off aggressive impulses.
So for openers perhaps we might discuss this: If all the world were
ballet dancers, would people be... nicer to each other?
Suddenly he giggled. "Would be worse. Much
worse. Dancers would all kill each other." And then he
scowled again and began teasing his hair into a fright wig.
"Terrible subject. Pick something else."
All right. He had once said something about
charisma that...
"Agh-hh! Terrible subject! Pick something
else."
Let's fake it, I suggested. I would pick him up
at the practice studio and wander over to the fashion fitting with him,
and we would talk about...whatever, and I would make it as painless as
possible.
"Painless? Hah. OK. I leave class
twenty minutes early and we talk. Twenty minutes, OK? You get
fantastic amount material."...
... And half an hour later he was leaping about the stage in a
bravura performance of the modern ballet "The
Ropes of Time", and 4000 ticket holders sat enthralled. From the
moment he appears, Nureyev commands the stage absolutely.
It isn't simply a matter of superb
technique; plenty of dancers have superb technique. It is rather a
matter of passion, which he projects across the footlights as powerfully
as a laser beam.
In his every movement there is the suggestion of
violence barely contained, and ballet people are forever describing him in
jungle metaphors: "a cat's grace," "a tiger's sinuousness." Nureyev
likes the image and nurtures it carefully.
"I am Tartar, not Russian," he says. "Tartar
blood runs faster in the veins. We are mixture of tenderness and
brutality."
He grew up far east of Moscow, near the Urals. He
began his formal training at 17 - incredibly late for a dancer - and
achieved the impossible: within two years he was solo dancer with the
famed Kirov Ballet in Leningrad. Nureyev had troubles with the
Kirov, and the Kirov had troubles with him.
The Russians said the trouble was his temperament.
He said the trouble was that he was expected to conform, politically and
professionally. In 1961 he made a dramatic defection while touring
France. It was headlined in the world Press as his "leap to
freedom," and overnight the young dancer, little known in the West, became
an international celebrity.
He has been grabbing headlines ever since.
"Nureyev is a great actor, both on and off the stage," Hurok says.
He has danced 'till dawn in discotheques and dressed in celestial get-ups
of velvet and fur...
Right now he was taking ten minutes' worth of curtain
calls, arrogant and smiling. ("The audience wants to be intimidated,
and when I intimidate them they really have a ball," he once declared
proudly.)
At the Class
But when he came charging into the practice
studio at moments after 11 the next morning there was no arrogance at all.
The class - some 40 dancers, mostly from the Royal Ballet, including
Fonteyn herself - was already in progress. Nureyev shot guiltily to
his place at the barre, and was shocked momentarily to see me sitting by
the piano, just feet away... and then took up the beat.
"Keep body hup! Hup, lady, don' sleep!
And - vun and two and tree - ya, pa, ya, pa - and ..." The
teacher strides like a prison warder along the rows of dancers. Who
would have thought they worked like this? On stage they seen to flow
like cream. Here they strain, pant, spines perilously arched, legs
impossibly flung, struggling to balance with grace in positions that would
cripple the rest of us for a lifetime. Nureyev is working like a
demon, perspiration dripping from the tip of his elegant nose, his
undershirt soaked.
The others stare blankly ahead, but I note that he
keeps flashing glances at the mirror-lined wall. He is following his
every minute gesture with the dispassionate eye of a meat inspector.
He makes a leap. Suddenly his mirror image
does something that displeases him, and as he floats in midair a horrified
grimace crosses his face. "Yech!" he howls, still floating. As
the music ends he mutters, "Terrible! Terrible!" and then, as he sees
Fonteyn giggling at him, he throws back his head and howls with sudden
laughter.
When the class ended, he ambled over to me, sopping
wet. "You enjoyed?" Yes, but I was exhausted merely from
watching, I said. "Hah! Me, I feel good. Before practice
I feel bad. Too much party, too much drink. Terrible.
After, I fee always good. In practice you make yourself pure."
...I chatted with the teacher, Madame Valentina
Pereyaslavec, once a prima ballerina and now a legendary teacher.
"Ah, Rudi..." she said. "Yes, many dancers
beautiful. But always the same. Only artist inside can
make role... I sit alone and begin to feel in my inside 'Swan Lake,' from
beginning to end. "Same with Rudi... Suddenly he have something from
wild cat inside. Suddenly lover. How he run! Nobody run
like him. Big steps, like young horse, so quiet..." And she
demonstrated, springing noiselessly across the room in defiance of her
60-odd years. "Ah, Ruditchka..."
- and we went out and got a cab..."So I talk and I
incriminate myself and I am sorry the rest of my life. Oh, it has
happened many times. When I have left Russia the journalists ask me
the most terrible political questions. I am without politics.
But they put in my mouth that I say this and I say that. Sometimes
they write stupid things...
Coat Fitting
Nureyev was a houseguest of Monique Van Vooren, the
Belgian actress. Miss Van Vooren greeted us at the door of her
apartment...Jean Louis is here." The Hollywood designer was waiting
with the fur coat Nureyev would wear for the "Harper's" photograph...Now
came the hat, an enormous mink beret. "I have hats like this," said
Nureyev, "but more wild."...
"Lunch. I must have lunch. Steak is blood.
I eat steak for lunch, then nothing 'till midnight. Sometimes I am
invited to supper after performances, and when I arrive I ask for steak.
so hostess thinks I am very rude. They expect me just to drink and
be nice and talk, talk, talk, and hear people tell me how great I am.
I want to eat."
"...In ten years they will chase somebody else. We dancers have to
go on long time, no? It is not like Presidential election, four
years, eight years. we must go on long time. Is not important
if they say you are greatest dancer. It only important what you
feel...When I was small boy in Bashkir, I wanted only to dance.
Once teacher complained to my mother that I was jumping all the time, like
rabbit. We were very poor. We ate potatoes, potatoes.
How would I leave Bashkir? So I made fantasy that strange man would
come and take me away and make miracle for me, and I would dance.
"He did not come, but always I had this fantasy. Now is no more
fantasy. Now I realize you have to do for yourself."
When one is called the world's greatest dancer, what is
there left to strive for? I asked. Perfection?
"Ah! You ask very dangerous question. Don't
write - listen! Sometimes journalists write so much, they don't
listen. You listen? Is no perfection. Always you
struggle with yourself. To maintain yourself you must surpass
yourself. You understand this?" Like a schoolteacher now, very
sober, talking to a slow student. "I was meant to dance. It is
not man who chooses art. Art chooses man, and man must not escape.
Man who escapes regrets it all his life."
..."Yes, art must come first. Man is lucky to have talent and be on
stage. but you ask about perfection. Listen carefully.
Body must have something, a force, to fight against, yes? Always in
artist there is tremendous tension waiting to explode, to left, to right.
"So you keep fighting to overcome this force, you
struggle to be in total control of body, and you are never in total
control. But once in a great while you have such a moment, when you
are doing what you want with your body. When you get there, it is
nothing. The moment itself is nothing. But the way to it is
great.
"This struggle, this effort itself, is the reward."... |
