Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In 1966 he had remarked that dancing Giselle or Sleeping Beauty was like singing Mozart, modern ballet being “no more than Puccini.” Now, however, he felt that a dancer was as entitled as any musician to mix his repertoire, to combine old with new: “You have Isaac Stern, Richter … able to play Mozart and Chopin, Prokofiev and Shostakovitch … Stockhausen … Cage. You should be able to become that instrument on which diverse choreography could be played. And have the mental capacity to grasp the essence and technical ability to change yourself into a different idiom.”

  Reunited with Egon Bischoff, his Vaganova contemporary who had become Staatsoper director in East Berlin, Rudolf criticized the lack of an antithesis in Russian ballet. “There, modern school did not develop.” He had even become aware of flaws in the teaching method itself. When another schoolmate, his “echo,” Sergiu Stefanschi, visited him in his dressing room in Madrid, Rudolf immediately instructed him to take off his shoes and show him a battement tendu. “Hah! I thought so!” he exclaimed as Sergiu curled his toes under while extending his foot to the side rather than keeping them straight as English dancers do. And again, when the young Chinko Rafique arrived from Leningrad to join the Royal Ballet in 1967, his Russian posture making him “stand out a mile,” Rudolf avuncularly took him aside. “Forget your schooling,” he told him. “You’ve got to dance like they dance.”

  There were those, however, who considered that Rudolf’s own style had become much too Westernized. Attilio Labis, the Paris Opéra star who studied in Leningrad with Pushkin in 1961, urged Rudolf never to forget that he was a Russian dancer. Dismissing the neatness and purity he had acquired in the West, Labis remarked, “He did that to please Margot. It’s academic, and classical dance is not academic; it’s the expression of the body and of the soul.” Kirov ballerina Gabriella Komleva felt much the same. “Maybe he spoke very nicely, but to us he had lost the song.” On the next occasion Sergiu Stefanschi saw Rudolf, after a performance in Paris, he decided to speak his mind. Rudolf had invited the dancer to join a large party for dinner, and although there were a number of celebrities present, including Jean Marais, Rudolf ignored them all and spoke in Russian to Sergiu:

  He wanted to know what I thought of his performance. We fight a little bit. “Rudolf,” I say, “I think you lost a little bit of your plié. Before in Russia, you would do it and go, but now you’re stopping.… I miss that legato. What you had and what we did in Pushkin’s class.” He start to get red.… “If I do a glissade and someone takes a picture of me. I want to be perfect.”

  At this point, though, the end of the sixties, Rudolf was no longer demonstrating the flawlessness he had projected throughout most of the decade. Traveling relentlessly and working with different teachers, he had begun to lose the clarity of his arabesque line. Russian classes put great emphasis on the back, and without this constant practice, Rudolf’s strength and suppleness were deteriorating. At the same time it can be no coincidence that 1968, the year that trained eyes began to notice a decline in Rudolf’s technique, also marked the end of his love affair with Erik—his lodestar of purity and perfection.

  On the other hand, technical decline was in itself a kind of liberation. For now Rudolf was able to accept the validity of the new—dance that “does not depend on beautiful line, unearthly balance, or sexual titillation,” in choreographer Paul Taylor’s words, but is “abstracted to express, in aesthetic form, the drives, desires and reactions of alive human beings.” Its pioneer, Isadora Duncan, used modern dance as a means of greater emotional communication; Martha Graham, to explore psychological ideas and complex personal relationships. It is a language that, as Rudolf himself recognized, “allows one to delve into one’s inner being” and, unlike classical ballet, one that sanctions the solo form. “Martha did all the ballets centered around herself. [Glen] Tetley did that for himself. And Taylor.” What would this unfamiliar idiom do for him? Rudolf wanted to know. “With these new movements: Will I be more expressive or less expressive?”

  For a dancer who embodied freedom, bringing its “large, magical aura” with him onstage, it was only natural that he would want to “crash the gates” between ballet and modern dance, yet again crossing from a familiar world to an alien one. It was a period when there was still a great deal of hostility between the two genres, each being, in Rudolf’s words, “like a medieval fortress, with no exchange from the outside.” Although others before him had attempted a bridge, Rudolf, as choreographer Murray Louis acknowledges, deserves most of the credit for freeing the way for future dancers. “He took the plunge, he took the largest gamble, he had the most to lose.”

  Rudolf’s first engagement with modern dance came about through a young Dutch choreographer whose work synthesized both forms of dance. Describing himself as “a sort of bastard between classical ballet and modern,” Rudi van Dantzig had been galvanized into making dance that reflected something of his own life and experience by seeing Martha Graham during her 1954 tour of Holland. Thirteen years later he was appointed codirector of the Dutch National Ballet, a company that greatly interested Rudolf because of its Balanchine repertory, then reputed to be the largest outside that of the New York City Ballet. Van Dantzig would not only continue to enrich DNB’s Balanchine heritage, and improve out of recognition the standard of the nineteenth-century classics, but also foster new choreography, himself creating psychodramatic pieces of originality and everyday relevance.

  Of particular note was his 1965 Monument for a Dead Boy, an adolescent’s rite of passage, inspired by Dutch poet Hans Lodeizen, a young homosexual whose romantic self-absorption and contemporary outlook had great personal resonance for van Dantzig. Lodeizen died of leukemia at the age of twenty-six, and it was the poet’s early end, as well as the suicide of a brilliant young painter van Dantzig had met, that “mingled in [his] head” when he heard the electronic music of Jan Boerman, leading to the creation of the ballet. Its central role was created by Toer van Schayk, van Dantzig’s lover since 1956, a dancer and painter who designed this and many other works for the theater. Gentle and kind-faced, van Schayk brought real subtlety and sensitivity to the part of the youth, a character he describes as “someone who doesn’t know how to cope with his life.… Doesn’t know himself; doesn’t know his sexual predilections.”

  Having been told about the Harkness Ballet’s successful 1965 revival in New York—“I have perfect system of information, spies everywhere”—Rudolf contacted van Dantzig when the Royal Ballet toured Amsterdam in July 1968. “You did ballet that I heard good things about. I wonder if I can perform it,” Rudolf remarked when they met in his dressing room after a matinee. He had some time free in October, and asked how long it would take to learn the choreography. “Two weeks, three at the most,” replied van Dantzig, prompting a scornful laugh from the star. “Two, three days is all I can give you.… Nothing more.” Believing nothing more would come of it, the choreographer was surprised to receive a follow-up telephone call a few days later when Rudolf suggested that they meet in Milan to discuss things further. After that events happened very quickly. Rudolf arrived in Amsterdam in late May—straight after the Royal Ballet’s New York tour—and “Dutch Rudi” was waiting at the airport to take him to his hotel. When he suggested a time to rehearse the following day, Rudolf was incredulous. “What do you mean? Nothing tomorrow, now, at once!”

  In the studio, however, there was no sign of urgency. As if willfully playing for time, Rudolf began arranging different pairs of ballet shoes, towels, and sweaters, tying on a headband, blowing his nose (on a hotel towel), before strolling over to the barre. While van Dantzig looked on he started a slow warm-up stopping occasionally to change shoes or pull on an extra leotard. It was the first time Rudi had seen the dancer at work, so he was not bored, and yet Rudolf’s total lack of communication made him feel “like some immobile and mesmerized victim being slowly but surely eviscerated.”

  Finally, after about an hour Rudolf, sweating profusely, announced that he was read
y, and asked to hear the music. “Noise,” was his only comment on hearing the tape of Boerman’s strange electronic wind howling. “Noise. Interesting.” When van Dantzig asked him to try marking time to it, he received a glance of startled incomprehension. The procrastination and off handedness had been a cover. Later Rudolf admitted how thrown he had been on first hearing the score. “I thought, ‘That’s not music, there’s nothing to grasp,’ but little by little you … realise the strong inner structure and it has even rhythm and there are a lot of landmarks.” Rudi was terrified himself. “It all seemed so ridiculous, what was this man supposed to do with my weird movements?” He began to demonstrate, hearing his voice wavering as he explained what he wanted. But instead of the steps appearing to come naturally to Rudolf, he was inflecting each one with such exertion that to Rudi it seemed “followed by an exclamation mark, as it were.”

  “Alright?”

  “What was I supposed to answer: ‘No?’ ”

  “The music is complicated and you still have to get used to my way of moving.…”

  “Good is good, not good is not good, please.”

  Rudolf repeated the piece and this time seemed almost to be deliberately caricaturing it: They struggled on, with Rudolf moaning, puffing, and panting over movements that were complex but should not have been that tiring. When someone came in to tell Rudi he had a phone call, he tore downstairs to his office, relieved to escape the stifling atmosphere in the studio. When he returned, Rudolf was going over the choreography, but stopped instantly when he realized that he had been seen. However, the short break had eased the tension, and by the end of the rehearsal, they were both laughing.

  “And what happens tonight?”

  “You’ll want a rest, won’t you?”

  But no. Having worked only on the solos, Rudolf now intended to try out the duets. A couple of hours later they were back in the studio with Yvonne Vendrig, an unusually expressive dancer of no more than eighteen, whom Rudi was currently nurturing. Although in awe of the famous guest, Yvonne proved a fair match for him, not allowing herself to be intimidated when it became clear from the “crashes, falls, and stinging abuse” that Rudolf was finding the lifts in Monument more than usually arduous. Rudi tried to diffuse the situation by explaining the motivation behind their parts. “They are fascinated by each other … both feeling their way toward each other, both afraid of going too far. The boy keeps withdrawing sooner than the girl; it is she who takes the initiative, over and over again.” “She’s a bitch,” Rudolf muttered audibly, making Rudi wish he had not subjected his protégée to such a disillusioning first experience of collaborating with a star. At the end of Vendrig’s “brave fight,” she sat sobbing in a corner while Rudi comforted her; a curt “bye,” and Rudolf had left the studio.

  About half an hour later Rudi knocked on Rudolf’s dressing-room door, certain he would not find the dancer inside. “It seemed most likely he would pack his bags and say: ‘This is no good for me; I’ve made a mistake.’ ” But there he was, sitting alone, like a sulky child, and immediately suggested that they should go out and eat. By now it was eleven o’clock, much too late to find a restaurant still serving food, but they stopped off at an oyster bar whose owner recognized Rudolf and volunteered to reopen the kitchen. Over dinner Rudolf for the first time expressed an interest in the content of Monument, rather than just the steps.

  “Tell me what is the ballet about? He loves boys, no?”

  “No, that’s just it, he’s a boy who’s still unsure whether he’s attracted to boys or girls. He’s imprisoned in a number of nightmarish impressions and experiences.”

  “A stupid boy, then.”

  Uncertainty was an emotion so alien to Rudolf’s nature that Rudi found it hard to understand why he had wanted to take on the role. His ballets were about ordinary people, not the kind of epic hero Rudolf had been brought up to be. “The Soviet ballet was built around extraordinary individuals. He was like that as a person, too.” But Rudolf was there to learn a new language, and Rudi van Dantzig was his instructor of choice. At thirty-five he may have been too close in age for Rudolf to accept his authority, but he was unusually frank, a quality Rudolf respected. As Toer says, “There were so many sycophants around him and here was someone very bluntly telling him what he thought.” Articulate, intelligent, and attractive, with long tousled blond curls, Rudi was also a good companion, and as they left in the small hours, walking along canals so redolent of Leningrad, the two linked arms like old friends. Curious about “human stories, about fathers and families,” Rudi encouraged Rudolf to talk of his Ufa childhood and his years with Pushkin, and they would stop from time to time to look in the windows of antiques shops in Spiegelstraat. “What can we do now?” Rudolf asked, pointedly. But even with Toer away, there was no question in Rudi’s mind of taking things any further. “I’m no saint, and it wasn’t out of nobleness to Toer. But I was never really attracted to Rudolf, so I don’t think I gave out any signals.” Instead, he told him where he could find the type of nightlife he seemed to be looking for. Amsterdam, with its radically tolerant social climate, had for more than a decade been the gay capital of Europe, its clubs being what interested Rudolf, not its easy access to recreational drugs. “This was very soon after the San Francisco incident and he had an enormous fear of being caught.” Accompanying him as far as the Kerkstraat district, Rudi then bade him goodnight. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, this is something you’ll have to do on your own. It’s not for me, that scene.’ ”

  When Toer van Schayk returned to Amsterdam Rudi suggested that he dance the role for Rudolf. Since creating it Toer had developed it greatly, to such a degree that when he finished, Rudolf walked over to his bag, threw in his shoes and towels, and said, “Why don’t you let him do it then?” before striding out and slamming the door. Ignoring the outburst, Rudi went on with the rehearsal, and within two minutes Rudolf had returned. “In my heart I felt for him.… Over the years, when I knew him better, I would notice that whenever he entered a new environment or an unknown company, he would harbor suspicion and mistrust, as though everyone was conspiring against him: the inhabitants of the safe, protected nest against the unknown intruder.”

  Earlier Rudolf had played up to the audience of dancers sitting on the sidelines, making faces, showing off “in a sort of commedia dell’arte way,” when differences of opinion arose between him and Rudi. Now, however, he ordered everyone to leave the studio, Toer alone staying, seated beside Rudi. Together they watched Rudolf demonstrate what he had learned in those two and a half days—both amazed that he had absorbed so much in so short a time. More confident now, Rudolf noticeably relaxed and even went so far as to ask Toer for help: “We have to start from beginning,” he said. Toer did his best, but he could see that the movements were not really within Rudolf’s scope. “Not technically, but because he wasn’t a modern dancer.” By the end of the fourth day, although he had mastered the steps, Rudolf’s interpretation needed refining, and it was only with great reluctance that Rudi got him to agree to an extra series of rehearsals. “He was a person to be onstage. Rehearsing was a drag for him. A loss of time.”

  On his next visit to Amsterdam, Rudolf surprised Rudi and Toer by asking if he could stay with them. They lived in a narrow little seventeenth-century house, a converted grocery, in the Jordaan, the old artisans’ quarter, the shop area now serving as a studio for Toer. At the top of a steep crooked staircase was a ladder up to the loft where they slept, with a tiny guest room beside it for Rudolf. In his ankle-length leather coat, harlequin boots, fur hat, and flamboyant shawl—“like the captain of some fairy-tale galleon”—he immediately seemed to fill the house to bursting point. But having imperiously announced on arrival that he drank only vodka, Stolichnaya vodka (resulting in Rudi cycling around town in search of a bottle), Rudolf in fact proved to be an “astonishingly meek” houseguest. Coming upstairs the first morning after preparing breakfast, Toer saw him in the process of making his bed, and laughingly pointed
out their own bed still in complete disarray: “Rudolf didn’t understand that I meant he shouldn’t bother. ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that too.’ ”

  In the studio it was a different matter. Rudolf continued to be difficult and was often late for class. On the third day he arrived for class early because Rudi had moved the wake-up hand on his alarm clock forward by three-quarters of an hour. Realizing that he had been tricked, Rudolf was furious. “You fiddled with my alarm!” he exploded. Then, grim-faced, he began his own daily routine at the barre: checking his port de bras, slowly arching his back. “It was certainly effective; all eyes were on him.” When class began he kept to his own tempo, working exasperatingly slowly and ignoring everyone around him. It was as important for Rudolf to ground himself in his Russian roots as it was to demonstrate to his fellow dancers that in this manner—in the ritual of classical class—he was beyond compare. Now he felt in complete control, whereas once the rehearsal started there would be those struck, as Rudi was, by “how awkward he could be, how uninventive.” Film footage taken at the time shows Rudolf straining to make an effect—“to create a character of desperate anguish,” his facial grimaces completely at odds with the delicately nuanced acting of his classical roles. When they first began collaborating, Rudolf had told his choreographer, “You are the boss, get it out of me and tell me when it is wrong.” But when Rudi tried to get him to subdue his portrayal, to understand that his “militant, sensual, and extrovert” youth was quite the opposite of the hesitant antihero he had had in mind, Rudolf became “rather snappy and sour and bitter.” While he badly wanted to do what was required of him, he could not bring himself to relinquish his own conception of himself, and in his debut performance on December 25, 1968, insisted on dancing The Nutcracker pas de deux on the same program. “This is what public expects from me,” he said defensively.