Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  In March, six weeks after his highly successful homage to Martha Graham, Rudolf mounted a homage to himself. It began with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, for which he rechoreographed so many steps that, seeing a video of the performance, Susie Hendl found his role “unrecognizable.” In The Tempest* he introduced an additional soliloquy for Prospero, a long farewell to the island, and in Marco Spada, the three-act work which Pierre Lacotte had staged especially for him, Rudolf insisted on dancing so many bravura solos that he made complete nonsense of its already unfathomable plot. In the original production, Angela’s bandit father was a role confined almost exclusively to mime. Rudolf, however, kept flinging off his cape to launch into one swashbuckling display after another, so that anyone unfamiliar with the story would have assumed Marco Spada was Angela’s favorite suitor. “The brigand chief’s role is needlessly massive,” wrote Freda Pitt. “Three or four solos should surely be sufficient for anyone … (he has six or seven).” Rudolf’s Prince Desiré—style apparel certainly gave him the appearance of a danseur noble, but his flaccid technique soon exposed the fact that he was not up to the role. Marco Spada provided him with one of his most strenuous roles to date, its hero, who was part villain, part aristocrat, was yet another example of the kind of double personage to which he was drawn.

  Francine Lancelot’s Bach Suite, which premiered on April 16, 1984, was a far more seemly role for its forty-six-year-old exponent. Technically untaxing, it also indulged Rudolf’s delight in the intricate little steps that clutter his choreography, which Olivier Merlin cites as “gargouillades, ronds de jambe, petits battements sur le cou-de-pied in the twittery manner of ballets from the court of Louis XIV.” The king, who danced every day for twenty years, had made the art he loved a male affair, and Rudolf saw himself shown to great advantage in this royal style. Aware that performing baroque dance—the very source of classical ballet—could only enrich his knowledge, he had asked its leading specialist, historian Francine Lancelot, to create a special solo for him. Presenting her with a very specific piece of music, Bach’s Third Partita for Cello, Rudolf did not hold back with choreographic ideas of his own. “In the saraband, for example, he practically executed movements à la Martha Graham. Some called this heresy, but it didn’t shock me. Even in Rameau’s time artists like Mlle. Sallé or Noverre sought in their interpretation … to personalize their dance.”

  Lessons at the Vaganova school in “danse française” had given Rudolf a basic grounding, but Lancelot had been astonished nonetheless by the ease with which he assimilated complex enchaînements with an instinctive grasp of authentic gestures. She remembered the stage fright he experienced before performing the twenty-minute solo—“a great solitude on this immense stage accompanied only by the cellist”—and yet Rudolf had seldom felt more in his element. “He had a passion for the baroque,” says his colleague Jean-Luc Choplin. “He loved the symmetry; the intellectual construction of Bach’s music; he collected drawings of dance costumes from this period. Bach Suite was a big pleasure for him.”

  “From me to me” was a favorite Nureyev expression, and although his dancers were becoming increasingly disgruntled at seeing their director performing so often, Rudolf considered this to be a much-deserved reward. “I have been thrown brutally into a surreal universe,” he complained, referring to the Paris Opéra’s invasive administration system. “He just didn’t understand it,” remarks Thierry Fouquet. “He didn’t understand the rules, the bureaucracy, and in particular, the union regulations which you have to take seriously in order to run a company as big as this.” Maude was aware of this, too. “Rudolf hated meetings, he hated arguments.” On the other hand Rudolf’s innate belief that no one was completely loyal made it possible for him to tolerate the Opéra’s infamously Byzantine intrigues. And, of course, the Paris Opéra had to tolerate Rudolf. The dancers had never before been subjected to this kind of leadership—the foul language, the attacks of rage usually culminating with a thermos bottle of tea smashed against the mirror. “I always thought of it as a way for Rudolf to control himself,” Jean-Luc Choplin says. “Otherwise he might have been very violent against somebody.”

  In May 1984 Rudolf did in fact physically assault a colleague, fracturing the jaw of a teacher who had infuriated him. It was a scandal that made newspaper headlines: “Quand Noureev boxe.” At eighteen, the handsome Michel Renault, a protégé of Lifar, had been the Opéra’s youngest-ever étoile, and in 1957, when he and Yvette Chauviré toured the Soviet Union to great acclaim, was seen by Rudolf in Giselle. According to Chauviré, it was not only Renault’s short tunic and entrechat sequence that had so impressed the young dancer. “As Michel ran around the stage his cape flew behind him. He did this for the first time in Russia, and it’s where Rudolf got the idea from.” After their performance Rudolf had been chatting to his Moscow fan Silva Lon when they both spotted the French star. “Silva went up to him and said, ‘I want to introduce you to our Albrecht.’ But Michel Renault ignored her and walked away.” Rudolf never forgot. His attitude to Renault, as with Lifar, was a mixture of admiration, personal grudge, and genuine dislike. Not only was Renault a disagreeable character, famously pretentious and superior, but in Rudolf’s opinion he had very little skill as a classical teacher. Watching a class one day, Rudolf kept stopping it to explain the way he wanted certain steps done. “Michel had been teaching at the Opéra for twenty years and took it very badly,” recalls Fouquet. “He was insolent with Rudolf, and Rudolf punched him.” Marie-Suzanne Soubie remembers her boss coming back to the office after the incident “hanging his head like a little boy” as he told her what had happened. She just laughed. “A lot of people would love to have done that!” Renault sued, and won, receiving 2,500 francs in compensation. “If I’d known it would be that little,” quipped Rudolf, “I’d have hit him a second time.”

  Just as the Opéra’s new director wanted his dancers to assimilate different methods of training, so he was determined to reinspire its veteran professors. Alexandre Kalioujny, a Lifar disciple, was one. “Sasha had always been a very good teacher for the boys, but the moment he met Rudolf he became a master,” says Elisabeth Platel. She remembers that Rudolf had given Kalioujny books to read, and that they had animated discussions in Russian during class. “Genia Poliakov would be there too—it was a trio—and the most amazing time for all of us. We were staying after class and trying different things. Rudolf wanted us to be every day new—to be open to learn.”*

  Rudolf himself could now admit to having been wrong about certain things—even his signature high demi-pointe. “I did that, but it was mistake. Very often onstage I would lose balance—just taking a bow I would stumble, because I didn’t know how to stand on my feet.” He no longer believed that Kirov dancers knew best; the Russian slow, sustained way of working was something he had come to question. Robert Denvers, another guest teacher to be invited, says that Rudolf wanted hardly any adagio movements at the barre. “He liked the almost Balanchinian beat. He had gone to the opposite end of the spectrum.” Rudolf intended the Parisians to benefit from his own evolution as a classicist. He was aware, for example, of a lack of flow to their dancing. “They do each isolated gesture very well, but like successive exclamation marks. The phrase is too short. It’s a series of affirmations more than a dialogue.” What was missing, Rudolf said, was “a certain respiration”—the very quality that classes with Stanley Williams had helped instill in him. Having failed to lure the master himself to the Opéra, Rudolf was delighted when Ghislaine Thesmar, who had worked with both Williams and Balanchine, eventually agreed to become a full-time répétiteuse. Combining America’s “fantastic teaching” with her traditional French base as well as her experience of performing in Russia, Thesmar could give the young dancers a balance of the “three upbringings” that Rudolf prized.

  He said, “Try to remember everything you learned from outside and make a melting pot; come as if from the market with lots of different things to feed everybody.” He was eager
to impart these influences from outside to the Paris Opéra dancers, saying if we had that en plus, it would be phenomenal. But the old French school resented it, thinking that it was rubbish. My own husband [Pierre Lacotte] thought that it was rubbish.

  Rudolf met his most formidable opponent in Claude Bessy, who was in charge of the Opéra’s École de Danse.* Not only a staunch upholder of the Concours examination and determined to perpetuate the name of Serge Lifar, she was “like a tigress” when it came to protecting the integrity of her school. A former étoile with blond hair, long legs, and curvy lines, Bessy had the glamour of a movie star (in 1960 Gene Kelly created Pas de Dieux, a famously raunchy duet, for the two of them), but in late middle age her position of authority had turned her into a fearsome virago. “We had a lot of fights,” she recalls. “Rudolf told me, ‘I am the director, I decide,’ and I said, ‘Not at the school, you don’t!’ ” Their disputes were often very minor, such as contesting the semantics of ballet vocabulary, which Bessy claims that Rudolf had Russified. “But he was never prepared to give way. He was always very open about culture, about painting, but with dance he resisted like a stubborn child.” Jean-Luc Choplin agrees. “There could be no compromise. Rudolf was a dictator, a tyrant, but it was always for the good of dance.”

  Like the Kirov and the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opéra rarely, if ever, auditions dancers from outside; as Balanchine put it, “We just take from the school.” And as the school inevitably forms the company style, Rudolf knew how vital it was to win Bessy over to his ideas. Wanting graduates to arrive “fully informed, disciplined, and capable of counting rhythms,” he insisted that Balanchine’s method should form part of the curriculum. “This was not a popular idea then.” Of equal value, he said, was the Bournonville technique, and he suggested that Erik be invited to teach the students, an idea Bessy agreed was excellent. But in the letter she wrote confirming her approval, she took the opportunity to remind Rudolf contemptuously that the Danish system owed its very existence to Louis XIV’s Académie Royale de la Danse: “I understand that you attach great importance to the Bournonville technique, but I’m astonished that you have remarked on this to me. If you came to see what we’re teaching at the school you would realize that we practice these said enchâinements which, by their essence, are French.”

  Rudolf was just as convinced that his own dancing was a vital method of instruction. “It is by dancing with them in rehearsals or onstage that I can bring them the most.” Certainly, by being in class every day—whatever shape he was in—Rudolf could keep his eye on how the dancers were developing. “That’s how he really managed to change the look of the company.” Not only that, but Charles Jude is certain that Rudolf would not have been able to direct if he had stopped dancing. “He needed to dance with us, to be with us, to show us things.” And Rudolf genuinely believed that what he had lost in technique he had gained in authority and inner power. “I admit that those who know me from fifteen or twenty years ago could be disappointed. But if someone is seeing me for the first time in Giselle, for example, I can still bring to him something coming from the depths of myself, an idealization of a gesture, which he will not find in someone young, no matter how high he can jump.”

  He was having dinner one night with Yvette Chauviré when he suddenly asked, “Tell me, Yvette, why is it when we have finally gained all our knowledge that we have to stop?” “It’s just something you have to accept,” she replied. “But why?” “He was really unhappy, and I said, ‘Rudik duchka, c’est comme ça.’ ”

  Acquiescence was not in Rudolf’s nature and, hearing derisive whistles while taking a curtain call, he had instinctively retaliated with an obscene “bras d’honneur.” This happened for the first time after his December ’83 Don Quixote, in which he had presented what Gérard Mannoni described as a “tragic approximation” of his former self. “What a shame that the greatest dancer of our epoch has not known how to … turn a page of his career by devoting himself to character roles if he can’t live without appearing onstage.” But like Margot, who admitted being “bored to death” as she walked about as the queen in Sleeping Beauty, Rudolf knew that “the only real pleasure is dancing.” Maude felt sure that part of him yearned for someone he respected to tell him to give up. “If Margot had said, ‘Yes, you must stop,’ or perhaps if I had told him that he should, I think Rudolf would have stopped. But actually, I don’t think anybody has a right to tell somebody to get offstage and stop living, as it were.” In fact they were both doing just the reverse. On June 21, 1984, Margot wrote telling Maude how Rudolf had asked her in New York, “Come on, tell me, is time to stop?” “I said I couldn’t possibly tell him to stop when he gives such wonderful performances. Please give him the excerpt from Joe’s letter and say that is exactly why he shouldn’t retire.” Ending her own letter with an emphatic, “Hear! Hear!” Maude encloses the panegyric from Margot’s Philadelphian friend. “Rudolf brought his magnificent Bach Suite. He danced in a handsome baroque costume a solo that defied description; a complete exposition of the development of the classical tradition.… It is miraculous the way he did this, and all within the confines of one composition for unaccompanied cello.”

  Having always considered Swan Lake to be “a kind of indicator whether I am on form,” Rudolf’s next move was to mount a new production at the Opéra. It was, he said, one of the most important ballets in which to display the company from top to bottom, but mostly it was a testing ground for himself: “For me and my body Swan Lake is indispensable.” And if his 1964 version had been called “The Ballet Called Siegfried,” this, two decades later, was “The Ballet Called Rothbart.” The malevolent storybook sorcerer who, in most productions, does little more than transfix Odette and introduce Odile was now to be given a real role. Rudolf said, “The whole story of this ballet comes from this one man.”

  Making a dual role for himself, Rudolf reintroduces to the first act the tutor, Wolfgang, transforming him in Siegfried’s mind into the scheming Rothbart. In act 1, he is both metteur-en-scène and mentor, his intense friendship with the young prince sanctioned by the philosophic concept of Eros socraticus: the love between an adult man and a boy. In their duet Siegfried imitates and follows his tutor, literally step by step, and it is Wolfgang who introduces him to an all-male alternative world. The usual polonaise is performed here by sixteen young men, coupling and canonically grouping themselves as Siegfried watches from the side. When the dancers disappear, he and Rothbart are left alone, and the slow solo that follows—the now-classic Nureyev interpolation—takes on a completely different dimension. In his first Swan Lake Rudolf intimates that the hero shares Tchaikovsky’s struggle to overcome his unnatural tendencies, the adagio solo plaintively expressing a similar conflict within himself. This, by contrast, is a heterosexual Siegfried. Because of his love of women, he withdraws from Wolfgang’s proselytizing and exposure to an implicitly gay fraternity. (The point was effectively underlined when Charles Jude performed the role with his wife, Florence Clerc, as Odette.) A reluctant puppet, Siegfried is unable to free himself of his tutor’s magnetic influence and still retains his independence by pursuing Odette. In revenge Wolfgang tricks Siegfried into being seduced by Odile, and so destroys the hero’s chance of happiness with his beloved.

  As a concept it is both brilliant and original, and Rudolf had also rethought the choreography of act 1. In line with Ezio Frigerio’s bare box of a set he planned a near-Balanchinian abstraction of the usual story ballet. There would be nothing but classical dance, its architectural patterns forming a cohesive link with the White Act that follows. Excited to begin work, he learned a few weeks before the first rehearsal that the company refused to be part of the production. French television had just broadcast Rudolf’s Viennese version and the dancers did not like it, complaining there was too much of his own choreography. Since 1960 the Opéra had included in its repertory Vladimir Bourmeister’s Swan Lake, which had been widely acclaimed when first seen in Paris four years ear
lier. Subordinating dance to character and dramatic action, it retained only the second act of the original Petipa-Ivanov production, making it, in Rudolf’s view, “an ersatz Swan Lake.” In Paris, however, as he was discovering, there was a lot of affection for the Bourmeister. “After 25 years they grow accustomed to that production and consider it was born there. They didn’t want my Swan Lake to supplant it.” By a unanimous decision (“minus six voices”) the company voted against a continuation of rehearsals.

  On Friday, November 9, a meeting was called for the director to present his case. Sitting on the floor and leaning against walls of the studio were 150 dancers of the Paris Opéra Ballet, whom Rudolf was forced to confront “like a guilty man in a courtroom.” Admitting that this was not easy for him, he began reading (in French) from a statement that Thierry Fouquet had helped him prepare. The idea was not only to break the deadlock over Swan Lake but to respond to a number of accumulated grievances. It was, Fouquet says, “a big turning point for us all.” While conceding to contractual points in his favor (the agreement that he could dance for another three years and perform forty times each season), Rudolf reminded the dancers of significant improvements in their working conditions since his arrival: the new studios, the increase in number of performances and opportunities to dance on tour. Denying the accusation of contempt for French schooling, he avowed his great respect for Claude Bessy but at the same time stressed the importance of incorporating Balanchine and Bournonville methods in the syllabus. “A school must not stay fixed and must keep itself alive by nourishment from exterior influences.” He also defended his dislike of the Concours examination, saying that only by allowing dancers to express themselves in major roles onstage could star talent be detected.