Word: ballets
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RUDOLF NUREYEV has been a highly photogenic figure during his career, both onstage and off: from the filmed ballet, Romco and Juliet, to the television tape of The Sleeping Beauty ballet; from his early exploits in Haight-Ashbury, to tales of his explosive temperament--most recently one about his slapping a clumsy ballerina in the face during a performance. Rudolf Nureyev: I Am a Dancer, is the most comprehensive footage on the man and his work to date, but the film offers little insight into its subject's flamboyant personality. Instead, it tiptoes around the man as though too much...
...film consists of segments from four of the Royal Ballet's repertoire, each a pas de deux featuring Nureyev and ballerina. La Sylphide, with Carla Fracci and The Sleeping Beauty, with Lynn Seymour, are both classical works. Field Figures, with Deanne Bergsma, choreographed by Glen Tetley, is a modern ballet. And Marguerite and Armand, with Dame Margot Fonteyn, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton especially for the pair, is based on Dumas's story of Mme. Recamier, the courtesan immortalized by Garbo in Camille. Ashton calls his ballet an "evocation poetique," but it is more like sentimental prose. The other pieces...
...Maybe the idea of rewriting Romeo and Juliet as a plea for ethnic tolerance seemed more startling in the '50s than it does now. Maybe putting a gang of Puerto Ricans and a gang of non-Puerto Ricans on the stage and letting them slug it out in a ballet had more impact then. (Maybe Jerome Robbins's choreography was better than this production's, I suppose.) In any event, as a showstopping obscenity, "mother-loving" just doesn't make it any more...
...mummified "prestige" pictures like Mary, Queen of Scots, must have taken more than a casual look at Capra's original excursion. The opening of his version matches Capra practically scene for scene-and sometimes shot for shot. The choreography by Hermes Pan contains at least one number-a ballet by a herd of brawny natives swathed in salmon-colored loincloths and swirling matching scarves-that could stand (or leap) as a concise definition of contemporary camp...
Imagine life as a sneaker-shod Dionysian ballet, reeling from the Marx Brothers to Samuel Beckett, from Madison Avenue to the groves of academe, from the incontinence of diaper days to the impotence of a palsied hand of poker in an old folks' death house. That will give you some brief notion of Dr. Hero. Yes, the central figure is our old friend and sometime bore, Everyman; but dismiss your initial, legitimate worries. This Everyman is no gullible Candide looking for the best of all possible worlds, no dour Diogenes straining for a glimpse of an honest...