Word: nureyev
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Thirteen years ago, Rudolf Nureyev, the first Kirov refugee, astonished Western audiences with his heroic bursts of explosive movement, animal magnetism and sheer showmanship, not to say showboatery. Baryshnikov is a dancer of equal authority but far different style. He is short, and his slightly chunky body seems to belong to a superb athlete as well as an artist. He floated Makarova overhead as though she had no more substance than a chiffon gown. His phenomenal double turns in air and grands jetês were done with a breathtaking ease that did not call attention to itself...
...pianist. But his mother enrolled him at twelve in the Latvian Opera Ballet school. "I didn't take it very seriously," he recalls. "Then I really bit into the forbidden fruit and I couldn't tear myself away." From Riga he went to Leningrad, where, like Nureyev, he studied with Ballet Master Alexander Pushkin. At 18, Baryshnikov joined the Kirov as a soloist...
Across Lincoln Center at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, an evening of sheer visceral joy was conjured up by Britain's Royal Ballet. The chief magician was Rudolf Nureyev, the company's conspicuous permanent guest artist. Following Kenneth MacMillan's disappointing Manon, which inaugurated the Royal's five-week New York-Washington, D.C. season, Nureyev scored a double success. He danced an impressive debut in the comic ballet La Fille Mal Gardée. On the other half of the program was a scene from La Bayardère, the "white ballet" he restaged...
Such a repetitious maneuver is exquisite torture for the corps de ballet, but it danced with a purity of feeling and tautness of leg muscle that did not falter. Nureyev's staging was a light modern gloss on the original Petipa choreography. It was also an exercise in personal nostalgia: La Bayardère is the crown jewel of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet where Nureyev was trained...
...Fille Mal Gardée represents a total contrast in mood. In the Royal's English version, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, it is like an animated John Constable landscape. The story tells of the romance between young Farmer Colas (Nureyev) and Lise (Merle Park), daughter of the ambitious widow Simone. With English country dancing and an intricate cavort around a Maypole, it is by no means all Nureyev's show. The familiar danseur noble, burning with erotic fervor, vanished. In his place was an impish rustic, playing cat's cradle, exploding from a stack of wheat...