Nureyev : The Life (9780307807342)

by Kavanagh, Julie

  Every day the three dancers took class together in a studio on place Clichy, and afterward, when Erik and Sonia began rehearsing Bournonville’s famous duet from Flower Festival at Genzano, Rudolf sat and watched. Mesmerized by Erik’s nobility and refinement, he was determined to analyze how the dancer was able to achieve a sense of such effortlessness with no gesture superfluous, no movement overinflated. Part of the illusion came from the buoyancy of the Danish style, as well as its use of stage space. More than any other choreographer, Bournonville loved transition steps that were delicate and fleeting, a fast pas de bourrée leading unexpectedly into a soaring jump, a chassé used instead of a glissade because it’s freer and lighter. Rudolf studied the dancers silently and intently, offering no advice, but when they started to rehearse Petipa’s Don Quixote pas de deux he began to take charge. He wanted Erik to adopt the slow matador walk that he had patented in Leningrad; predatorily circling the stage before adopting a starting position, and signaling for the music to begin. It was his way of building up what Fonteyn called “that amazing tension,” alerting the audience to the fact they were about to see something spectacular. Erik and Sonia were not impressed. They tried explaining to Rudolf that Western dancers did not break the atmosphere in this way, that by the time the ballerina had finished her variation her partner must be there, ready to start. “We didn’t wait for him to walk onstage and take his preparation as if to say, ‘Now I’m going to perform a trick.’ ”

  A decade earlier, when Erik had been disenchanted with Danish conformism, he might have been more receptive to Rudolf’s innovations, but that year he had written a book with the American critic Lillian Moore on Bournonville’s Études chorégraphiques* and rediscovered his appreciation of the master’s technique. He knew that it was precisely this Russian focus on bravura that had affronted the choreographer when he visited St. Petersburg in 1875 and was shown Don Quixote by Petipa himself. Although the two maestros admired each other, Bournonville had found it impossible to suppress his view during their conversations that ballet should not be a show. The duet not only was difficult, it looked difficult, he said, whereas true artistry disguised the mechanism of technique. “The appearance of ease,” he wrote, “is achieved only by the chosen few.” Erik, of course, being the archetype.

  As much as Rudolf aspired to the suave grace of Erik’s classicism, he was not inclined to relinquish his own ideas. Preparations to steps, which Danish dancers had been trained to conceal, he believed should be made part of the performance (a prime example being his soft-footed run around the stage in Corsaire, which was just as rousing as the solo that followed it). “The art of dancing is not to make a difficult step look easy,” he believed, “but to make an easy step look interesting.” The incompatibility of their two schools kept surfacing: the Danes preferred pirouettes with the working foot wrapped ankle low; Rudolf had invented the ultra-high retiré. Bournonville technique for men separates the upper from the lower body with torso and arms held still in perfect bras bas so as not to distract attention from intricately beating feet; the Vaganova style works the body in harmony. “One step. You do that step by whole body … nobody understand well enough in the West. It’s not technique. The use of the back, arms, neck, shoulders, all ports de bras—it’s all Vaganova.”

  More mature, and at a stage in his career when he could accept the validity of different approaches, Erik was also the more controlled of the two, but nevertheless there were constant arguments, Rudolf’s rages being intensified by his frustration at having tried—and failed—to reproduce Erik’s flawless execution. The conflict continued outside the studio. There was one night when Rudolf came to rue Lécluse in a panic, telling Sonia that they had had a fight, and that Erik had walked out. Taking Rudolf with her, Sonia began to search all the places she thought Erik might be until, eventually, they found him. “That was the only time I have ever seen Rudi so humble.” And yet for all the turbulence during this period, Erik described himself as having a kind of epiphany in Paris:

  In the very beginning when he first arrived in Denmark, because of Maria and my situation I was very tense and uptight and was not very open to seeing anything.… It was not until we were in Paris actually … that I really had a chance to sit back and look at him. I had been looking but not actually seeing anything and suddenly I saw!

  What he could now appreciate was Rudolf’s remarkable candor and impetuosity, which were in such contrast to his own veiled, inscrutable self. “He just responded to that very powerful thing in Rudolf, who could suddenly open everything and let you see his soul,” said Glen Tetley. On their return to Copenhagen, Erik asked Rudolf to move in with him.

  Number 16 Violveg, a two-story house hidden behind a hedge, was where Erik had lived since he was a child. About ten kilometers from the city, it was in the pleasant garden suburb of Gentofte, whose streets have flower names, and which has a lake nearby. Erik’s mother lived there, too, but unlike Sonia’s comforting “Mamushka,” Ellen Bruhn was a hard, possessive character who made her resentment of Rudolf’s arrival quite clear. “These two people had what seemed to be a violent reaction to each other,” Erik recalled. The maternal figure in his life had always been his aunt Minna, a loving woman who took care of him and his four sisters while their mother went out to work. Fru Bruhn, who ran a hairdressing salon, was the family breadwinner, as the children’s father, an ineffectual man who gambled and drank, had long since moved out of their home. In this overwhelmingly female environment Erik was doted on and constantly in demand—an emotionally draining situation now intensified by Rudolf’s own dependence on him. “When I came from Paris … my family—especially my mother—wanted all of me, and there just was not enough of me,” he later wrote to Rudolf, explaining his distant moods. But Erik was all Rudolf had. “He combined the teacher, lover, mother and father. He was Rudolf’s family now. He no longer had any roots.”

  On September 13 a telegram arrived at Rossi Street congratulating Alexander Ivanovich on his birthday. The Pushkins were overcome with relief. They had been convinced that the Soviets would kill Rudolf in the West—“It could be a car accident, it could be something else”—and they never knew if the rumors they kept hearing were true. One day someone rang to tell the couple that Rudolf had been captured, taken to Moscow, and incarcerated in a mental hospital. In a terrible state, Xenia begged Tamara to go there immediately and search them all. Teja described the atmosphere:

  In the theaters, in the schools, as well as in the dormitories of the ballet school there was a lot of talking. Someone said he had gone to England, another said to Paris, yet another said he was dead or that he was about to join the Kirov troupe in America to return together with them. Another one said they had already sentenced him to death.

  And, in a sense, they had. Rudolf was to be tried in absentia for state treason, the maximum sentence for which was execution. Determined to do whatever they could to halt the procedure, and at a huge cost to themselves, his parents sent three telegrams in succession to the chief prosecutor and chairman of the Leningrad court, paying in addition sixty rubles in advance for an answer: “We are asking you to suspend the trial of Nureyev Rudolf Hamitovich until he returns. We are applying to the government so that we can help him to come back, but we believe that the process of the trial will hinder his return.”

  Rosa followed this up with her own telegram from Leningrad, making the same request, and adding, “We believe that he will return if we help him.” As it happened, Rudolf’s court case had been delayed because key witnesses were away on the Kirov tour of the United States until December 10. Meanwhile the KGB opened its file on the traitor, number 50888, comprising his confiscated passport, details of items seized from Ordinarnaya Street, including his piano, Western press clippings attached to a Russian translation, and depositions recorded in preparation for the trial.

  Among the testimony by Kirov colleagues is a surprisingly hostile account by Alla Osipenko, clearly made to atone for her own misdemeanors i
n Paris. “He was not respected by the company,” she said. “People resented him for being rude and too self-regarding.” Speaking out in Rudolf’s defense, Rosa outlines her brother’s difficult background in Ufa, and suggests that the physical strain he put himself under was the main cause of his volatility. “By nature, he was a kind, honest and loving son.” Alexander Ivanovich explains how Rudolf came to live in their home, and mentions the “special understanding” that he and his wife were able to provide. He admits that the dancer could be ill mannered and high strung, but insists that he never heard him express anti-Soviet sentiments. “His act was carried out in a fit of passion because of the pressure he was under.” Xenia also stresses that art alone was paramount to Rudolf, and agrees that he could be extremely difficult. He had no friends, she says, claiming that her own attitude to him was “the same as with any of my husband’s students: I took care of him.” Knowing they were under KGB scrutiny, she confesses that a week after Rudolf’s birthday telegram they had received a telephone call from him. Telling Xenia that he was in Copenhagen and planned to go to London soon, he seemed particularly interested in knowing which dancers had been chosen for the company’s tour of the United States. To her question “When are you going to come back?” he did not make a definite reply. Then, with characteristic impulsiveness, Xenia volunteers her own suspicion: “I understand there’s something keeping him there.”

  Her intuition was right. By now “a totally reciprocal deep passion” existed between Rudolf and Erik, their emotional intimacy coexisting with an extraordinary artistic interchange. This began each day at the barre. Home-movie footage shows them working together in a studio, both dressed in black. Erik raises one arm into an arabesque position, Rudolf, facing him, does the same. They study themselves in the mirror, not with vanity but with the self-critical scrutiny of dancers. Then they change sides. Still facing each other, they move in close, their heads almost touching as they begin a fondu en arabesque exercise. A faintly homoerotic undertone now emerges, which also plays on the idea of gender reversal, as they partner each other. Rudolf supports Erik’s leg on his shoulder effecting a grand rond de jambe as he promenades around holding Erik’s hand and forcing the arch of his back. Rudolf studies the effect in the mirror. Erik then does the same for him. Still at the barre, they try out a Don Quixote matador stance known in the bullfight as the quiebro: feet immobile, the body twisted and extended into the curve adopted by the matador before he plants the sword—upper torso sensually arched, head inclined, eyes half closed. Rudolf’s crescent is less exaggerated than Erik’s, but also more arrogant and commanding. Erik watched how Rudolf took the same steps and made them his own. “It was like speaking the same language, using the same words, but expressing oneself with a different accent and intonation.”

  In the center they take turns to set exercises: Rudolf leading a Pushkin-inspired, controlled adage, Erik a grand élévation sequence followed by a series of entrechat six. Here the difference in their schooling—and in their ages—is unmistakable. Erik executes the petite batterie with his arms placed and perfectly relaxed, Danish-style, whereas Rudolf is more agile in a Petipa diagonal of beaten cabrioles en arabesque, which Erik struggles through. Having begun working separately, neither wanting to influence the other, they slowly start to experiment, one trying the other’s way of doing things. “That’s how we began to take from each other. We got so that we hardly talked at all: we knew and understood each other just from a gesture of the hands.” Stirred by the lyrical ardor in Rudolf, which he himself lacked, Erik had begun inflecting his movements with more force and passion, while Rudolf, never ceasing to marvel at Erik’s attention to detail, was working toward achieving classical calm and perfection for himself. They were Apollo and Dionysus who had found their opposite and were feeding off each other. And this was more than a metaphor: Each, in his way, had apotheosized himself. “When you listen to Bach you hear a part of God.… When you watch me dance you see a part of God,” Rudolf once said, while for Erik, too, the artist was semidivine, capable of attaining what he described as “something total—a sense of total being.” “There have been certain moments on the stage—four or five times—when I have suddenly felt a feeling of ‘I am!’ A moment that feels as though it’s forever. An indescribable feeling of being everywhere and nowhere.”

  Here Erik is almost quoting the Romantic mystics (echoing Coleridge’s “The Great Eternal I Am” in the Biographia Literaria, as well as Scriabin’s resounding “I am,” the orgasmic climax to the Poème de l’extase*). Rudolf, too, describing the sense of exultation he felt after a performance of Corsaire, said, “Not ‘I did it!’ But ‘I AM!’ Sense of exultation; you become somebody else. You become IT.… You yourself are thrilled. And it passes on. The thrill of BEING.” And yet it was not Erik but Rudolf who was the self-appointed “Romantic kind of dancer,” the solipsist and embodiment of the physical gusto Hazlitt called “animal spirits”; Erik, by contrast, was self-effacing. “The question of to be or not to be haunted Erik all his life,” said his close friend Susse Wold, to whom he once confided an out-of-body experience he had had as a child. “He had climbed an apple tree, and was sitting on a branch listening to his mother calling for him, but felt that somehow he wasn’t there. He could see himself, and yet he was gone.” Erik, who had tried various kinds of Buddhism, always returned to the way of Zen—its doctrine being the dissolving of the ego into the universe, the total extinction of the self.

  At an October 1961 London performance of international stars, Rudolf’s influence on Erik was never more apparent: His whole manner was suddenly more theatrical as he walked onstage with deliberate, big cat steps, or made a standard pirouette more thrilling by giving it “a whiplike quality.” His performance was the only highlight of the evening; everything else being “a travesty and a parody of ballet,” as Colin Clark wrote in a colorful account to Violette Verdy:

  On Tuesday we went to see Anton Dolin Presents.… AAARGH!! Celly [Colette] who is normally pretty reserved, actually booed she was so disgusted (which much surprised The Observer critic who was sitting in front of us). Nina Vyroubova—terribly out of practice, lazy and slack, Sonia Arova—better but again not taking any trouble, Lycette Darsonval—70, need I say more. She managed to make it look a real feat to get out at all.… Michel Renault, 60 … and Anton Dolin who gave his own inimitable performance of Bolero for the 7,200,001th time at the age of 63…. Then suddenly, divinely, Erik Bruhn. Quite marvellous, and getting a really fed-up audience back to life by dancing, yes actually dancing—the first person so far to do so.… We saw him afterwards and he is so sweet and modest and shy. Celly tells me he is only happy in a deadbeat group where no one expects anything, as he is so neurotic and nervous. But he certainly is a really very great dancer.… Poor Celly was beside herself to see the art she loves so much debased to such a level and no wonder. I am glad to say the audience agreed, and only clapped for Erik Bruhn. Him they gave a thunderous applause.

  The Royal Ballet’s director, Ninette de Valois, was also there that evening and, after the performance, invited Erik to guest with the company in November—a stroke of fate, it seemed to him and Rudolf, as this coincided with the date of Fonteyn’s gala. In the meantime Rudolf was due to join the de Cuevas tour of Israel, an experience that proved far more enjoyable than he had anticipated, as the landscape with its small clustered villages and half-old, half-new towns felt curiously familiar. “I had very good time. I swim and I have performances. It was perfect. It was sun. Reminded me of south of Russia: the construction of Tel Aviv and the people—very alive. Warm.”

  With his partner, Rosella Hightower, and a couple of other dancers he rented a car to explore what he described as “places of Christ and Biblia”—biblical scenes—driving from Haifa to Jerusalem, with Rudolf occasionally taking the wheel. Although “just bumping about,” he loved the sensation of being in a car, as he felt safe there, and unafraid. Rosella was amazed to see how much more relaxed he was than in Paris
, “where he was always hiding”: “No matter where we went, he’d want to get out to see and to talk. He was anxious to know everything. As a race, the Israelis are so friendly and clannish that they must have felt to him like family. He was very much at home.”

  Many of the people he met were Russian émigrés, and a number of English-speaking fans also befriended him. “They find me … invite to house to make parties.” One was a wealthy young woman who worshipped Rudolf, and followed him throughout the tour. Rosella remembers Rudolf being extremely rude to her, treating her as if she hardly existed, but nevertheless he was clearly thriving on all the attention. “Whether it was the girls or the boys—he’d just disappear in the evenings. He was discovering a new angle on the way he thought he could live and having one helluva good time.”

  The cruising had begun.* To the company’s amazement—and Raymondo’s fury—Rudolf would pick up “n’importe quoi” on the Tel Aviv beach and bring him back to his dressing room. “We were horrified,” said Ghislaine Thesmar. “There were a bunch of good-looking boys in the company, but Rudolf didn’t concern himself with them. What he discovered on those beaches was the freedom of anonymity; partners you never saw again. It was a choice.” And it was another difference between Rudolf and Erik.

  In London at the end of October Rudolf’s first rehearsals with Frederick Ashton took place behind closed doors. The choreographer had agreed to create a special solo, but only grudgingly, as he had never seen Nureyev perform. More important to Ashton even than working with dancers he knew was his choice of music, and in this case the score had already been decided by Rudolf: Scriabin’s Poème tragique. For some time he had been wanting to dance to this short prelude, but not because he felt himself to be a tragic figure. “Not at all. Not because of name. I used [sic] like that piece very much.” He had loved it in Russia, and a year earlier had seen it performed by the Bolshoi in a new ballet by Kasyan Goleizovsky, the most prominent innovator in Soviet ballet, who often used Scriabin’s music. Although written in 1903, a turning point for the composer who then went on to experiment with agitated rhythms and unusual tonality, the Poème tragique for Piano, op. 34 in B flat, was still under the influence of Liszt and Chopin, two of Ashton’s favorite composers.