The Observer January 1972 Alexander Bland	The kiss of life Ballet tradition notoriously rests on a perilously narrow base.  Giselle, Coppelia, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, Don Quixote and La Sylphide - that is all we have in the West (the Royal Ballet ignores the last two) and they are visibly being worn into the ground.  Several others survive in Russian in one form or another.  We have a scrap of La Bayadere (when will the Russians bring us the rest?), and Raymonda has lain hibernating, a sleeping beauty waiting for the final kiss of revival. Nureyev has already given her two pecks, once for the Royal Ballet Touring Company and once for the Australians.  Neither quite restored the colour to her cheeks, and last weekend in Zurich he made a more vigorous onslaught.  In true fairy-tale fashion the third try proved lucky and she has emerged at last in her true full-blown splendour, a lavish addition to the meagre nineteenth-century menu. Raymonda only just squeezes into that category.  It was born in 1898 and represents the final phase of the Romantic movement in which classical ballet is grounded.  We are familiar enough with the early phase of disembodied sylphs and wilis; but the other face of romanticism, the warm-blooded sex-and-violence exoticism celebrated by men like Sir Walter Scott or Delacroix, has so far been missing from dance-drama.  Here it is at last, and a brave show it makes, a splendiferous dish for the groundlings sprinkled with the choicest choreographic plums for the connoisseur.... The diamond glints come mainly from the Petipa variations, some of the most beautiful he devised, which are artfully scattered through the evening.  they are set in a production which Nureyev has reworked to give it more coherence, and to lubricate the unfamiliar period conventions without betraying the driving conception which set them in motion.  In this new version Raymonda becomes so excited at her imminent marriage to Jean de Brienne, freshly back from the Crusades, that she begins to confuse him in a dream with one of his dark and sensual Saracen enemies we are reminded of Odette and Odile).  The period fantasies - dusky warriors, jousting, oriental orgies and hand-to-hand duels - become figments of a period imagination.  With this small twist the whole pasteboard edifice becomes believable, without the faintest retreat from the original...
Dance and Dancers April 1972 John Percival	Raymonda Rediscovered ...Nureyev's production makes big demands on the whole company, which were met very creditably...The way Nureyev's approach to Raymonda has developed over the years is characteristic of his outlook on classical ballet, wanting to see it make sense while preserving the best of the past.  Just as his own dancing owes its special quality to the fact that he is never content even with success, always trying to improve on his own best, so his growing skill as producer and choreographer derives from the same driving purpose...Nureyev's actual choreography is, for the most part, a homage to Petipa - and what better model to choose?  He has also, I would guess, been influenced a lot by working with Jerome Robbins...An once more Nureyev's own dancing proved a joy; not only in the clear-cut outline of every step, the marvelous phrasing and projection of the whole, but also in the way he conveys character.
Evening News Friday, June 30, 1972	Behind the Scene with Nureyev The Leather look - worn with a nice line in caps to give it a jaunty air.  The clothes are the choice of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as he relaxes near his home in Richmond for a scene for the film I Am A Dancer.  It is a portrait of his personality, but celebrities from all walks of life will be featured in the production which has a Royal Premiere at the ABC 1 on Tuesday.  Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, will attend with proceeds going to the Royal Ballet School's Endowment Fund.
Evening Standard Thursday, July 6, 1972, Page 23	Dancing flesh to flesh, a fascinating study of the great Rudolf at work - Film: I Am A Dancer (95 mins., ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue. Since even a pas de deux in a classical ballet seems to a layman like me to be danced with plate glass between the performers, it's a joyful experience in I Am A Dancer to see flesh actually press against flesh.  Of all four ballet excerpts danced by Rudolf Nureyev in this variable but fascinating study of him in temperament and movement, the most modern and way out is the best.  Glen Tetley's Field Figure goes against the classical grain and seems to me totally transfixing.  As Bryan Forbes says in a discreet commentary, it isn't a work with the heart-stopping verticality of the classics.  But it has an almost tangible horizontal sensuality as Nureyev and Deanna Bergsma, both of them clad in nothing more voluptuous than rehearsal tights, lock themselves into a crab-like intimacy at floor level and, without rising much higher, slither, crawl, slide, squirm and gyrate over each other in an unbroken continuality of pure movement that emphasizes this dual balance which acrobats display and ballet dancers usually conceal....