Word: nureyev
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...began the career of Rudolf Nureyev in the West. As entrances go, it could not have been more compelling if it had been choreographed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the four years since his leap to freedom, Nureyev (pronounced Nu-ray-yef) has never stopped going up. At first he was a side-show curiosity, a defector in tights. Critics dubbed him "the dancing bear" and "the boy Sputnik." But as he danced across the stages of Europe and North America, the wondering soon turned to wonder. Now, on the eve of a three-month return tour of the U.S. with...
Prince & Swan. If this were not enough, Nureyev has been further blessed with a classic partner-Dame Margot Fonteyn, long the reigning ballerina of the Western world. Since they teamed up on the stage of the Royal Ballet three seasons ago, a mystique has grown up around them that rivals the most ethereal fantasies they portray onstage. They have about them all the magic makings for a fairy-tale romance. He is 27, a moody, mysterious Tartar bristling with savage charm. She is 45, an alabaster beauty of elegant refinement. He is the glittering young prince in the first bloom...
...artistic relationship of Nureyev and Fonteyn, he is the dominant force, amending, criticizing, suggesting. It comes naturally to him, just as his gifts for choreography do. His restaging of the Kirov's full-length Raymonda was a pretty, 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...
...Tartar. Nureyev was in fact born in motion-on a train rattling across the icy stretches of Siberia. It was 1938, and his peasant mother was en route to visit his father, a soldier assigned to teach Communist doctrine to a Russian artillery unit stationed just then in Vladivostok. But Nureyev does not feel Russian. Both his parents, he proudly points out, are descendants of the "magnificent race of Bashkir warriors," and therefore "I am Tartar, not Russian." The Tartar temperament, he explains, is a "curious mixture of tenderness and brutality...
With his father away on war duty, his mother moved in with her brother-in-law and another family in the town of Ufa on the dark steppes west of the Ural Mountains. Nureyev lived in one room with nine other people, including his three sisters. "My prevailing memory," he says, "is one of hunger-consistent, gnawing hunger." To get food, mostly goat cheese and potatoes, his mother peddled all of his father's civilian clothes piece by piece-belts, suspenders, boots. "Daddy's grey suit was really quite tender," the children would say. Since...