Word: ballets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sugar-spun spectacle and, along with Nureyev's offstage antics, the roaring sensation of last year's Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds in Italy. Last October he rechoreographed the Petipa-Ivanov version of Swan Lake in Vienna. In his strong belief that "the Amazonian takeover" of the ballet has resulted in an appalling denigration of the male, Nureyev scissored Tchaikovsky's music, jiggered dances, and virtually reworked every number until the dreamy fairytale prince emerged as a rip-snorting hero who dominated both the dance and drama...
When he was seven, one of the teachers taught him a few Bashkir folk dances, and he was soon touring the local hospitals with the school troupe. One night the Ufa Opera Ballet imported a name ballerina and, though he did not have the price of a ticket, Nureyev went by the theater determined somehow to get in. As fate would have it, the crush of the crowd was so great that the doors of the theater collapsed and in he went. It was the first ballet he had ever seen. "Watching the dancers that night," he recalls...
Broken Rules. At 15, Nureyev joined the Ufa Opera's corps de ballet, saved his money, and a year later bought a one-way ticket to Leningrad to audition for the Kirov. Though by Russian standards he was about six years late in beginning his formal training, he was accepted for the Kirov's ballet school. He immediately distinguished himself as its most brilliant and most unmanageable student, violated every curfew regulation, fought with his instructors. He lectured a teacher in front of the whole company on the evils of the Kirov's "systematic wearing-down...
...Team. Paris' Marquis de Cuevas Ballet instantly hired Nureyev for $400 a week, more than he had made in six months with the Kirov. His mother, brought to Moscow by the government, called him every day on government orders and pleaded with him to come home. But, he says, he forever erased any thoughts of returning when, at his debut performance, the local Communists staged a raucous demonstration and scattered the stage with broken glass...
...under Balanchine. But when a meeting was finally arranged, the great man said: "Rudolf, when you are tired of playing the prince, come to me." Eventually Nureyev decided that Balanchine was exercising a "castrating influence" on the male dancer and said so publicly. That eliminated the New York City Ballet. Five months after his defection, Nureyev received an invitation from Margot Fonteyn to dance at her annual London charity gala. Both were so instantly taken with each other ("He is the first Russian I met who can make me laugh," she said) that they decided to team up. They made...