Word: fonteyn
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...Margot Fonteyn danced the pas de deux from Swan Lake while Isaac Stern played the violin. Van Cliburn knocked off a Hungarian rhapsody. Shirley Verrett brought down the house with Donizetti. Sol Hurok was celebrating his 60th year as an entrepreneur with a salute from his stars. The audience that packed the Metropolitan Opera House at up to $100 a ticket in tribute to the 85-year-old Russian immigrant was stellar too. In the crowd: Vanderbilts, Astors, Roosevelts, Whitneys, Cristina Ford, Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, and the Prince and Princess Alfonso de Borbon of Spain. A visitor to Hurok...
...Sleeping Beauty ballet was introduced to America in 1916 by Pavlova in an Orientally ostentatious production that promptly sank into obscurity. It was not until Margot Fonteyn and the Sadler's Wells company brought the work back in 1949 in a performance of pristine elegance that Tchaikovsky's Beauty emerged as the belle of the ballet. Now, fitted out with new staging and choreography by Rudolf Nureyev, and preening in an elaborate wardrobe of costumes and sets, the National Ballet of Canada's new Sleeping Beauty is on display at the Metropolitan Opera. It is a stunning...
...pieces of formal works are strung together by clips of Nureyev rehearsing, Nureyev exercising, Nureyev resting, Nureyev breathing. And the entire movie is narrated with Nureyev and Fonteyn's words interspliced) by Briton Bryan Forbes, intoning as though he were touring Stonehenge, from a script with such penetrating insights as, "dancing is very difficult, you know", or "this is a dancer's dressing room; no frills, just four bare walls...
...Nureyev's personality goes, it's the same old story about how hard-working and attentive he is, how eager to innovate, how much the heart-throb of the ballet world in shots of his ogling fans, almost all of them are teeny-boppers or middle-aged women). Fonteyn begs the question of Nureyev's temper: "superficially he might seem to have some bad sides, but I don't think they're important." I can understand that the makers of the film might have been hesitant to pry uninvited into Nureyev's private affairs: if his reputation...
...because modern ballet, like modern dance, depends more on physical relationships than on theatrical effects and can therefore stand the closeness of the camera, and also because Bergsma is a fascinating dancer. She has legs which rival Nureyev's, in their own special way. And, of course, he and Fonteyn together are unbeatable. One of the good aspects of this film is that it is possible tosee how much better Nureyev performs, how much he comes out of himself when he is dancing with Fonteyn than when he is with anyone else. He would never dare slap her. Speaking...