Maia Makhateli
(Picture: Andre Uspenski)Recently, I met a woman who was a Rudolf Nureyev super fan during his 1960s prime. She recalled waiting for him at stage door; when he finally swept out at 1am, she leant forward in her miniskirt and kissed him. “He smelled of parma violets,” she said dreamily.
That devotion was the Nureyev effect – the incendiary dancer defected from Soviet Russia in 1961 and became a household name in the west, intellectually and sexually voracious, dying too young in 1993. Dancers’ legacies are written on the wind, but Nureyev’s persists: on film, in the ballets he staged and through colleagues who now share his art with new generations. The American dancer Nehemiah Kish, a former Royal Ballet principal, curates this gala, introduced on opening night by the actor Ralph Fiennes and former director of the Royal, Dame Monica Mason: a labour of love, in which ballet’s A-listers mostly bring their A-game and suggest why Nureyev still matters.
Nureyev made his name with bravura technique, and we got a good dash of this on Monday night. In a sequence from Laurencia, the Royal’s Cesar Corrales casually launched himself in mid-air, and bounded around the shallow stage with such tiggerish exuberance that it’s a wonder he doesn’t take out a bassoonist (the Royal Ballet Sinfonia sits at the back, lit in amber; their orchestrations skew lush).
Laurencia is one of the Soviet ballets – ideology plus panache – which launched Nureyev’s career, and Oleg Ivenko (who starred in The White Crow, Fiennes’ film about the defection) unashamedly showboated in another, Gayané (the only work here by a female choreographer, Nina Anisimova). Francesco Gabriele Frola was deliciously buoyant in a rare Bournonville duet. These comparative curiosities give the programme character – it’s not just the Tchaikovsky hits.
Ballerinas famously had to wrench attention from Nureyev, who reshaped classic ballets with firework male solos. Some, like Margot Fonteyn, relished the challenge, and the gala includes Natalia Osipova’s reckless jumps in Laurencia. Yasmine Naghdi was equally competitive with Corrales in the closing pas de deux from Le Corsaire, smacking down dauntless pirouettes against his corkscrew leaps.
But Kish’s choices argue that Nureyev was about finesse as much as flash; we also see some of modern ballet’s most elegant blokes in his programme. Vadim Muntagirov’s limbs inscribed filigree lines on the air in The Sleeping Beauty, while in La Bayadère, an austere Xander Parish conveyed Nureyev, guardian of classical tradition – he may have ditched his Russian passport, but he hugged its heritage works close.
Most searing of all was an excerpt from Giselle, the ultimate romantic ballet. An economical, bereft William Bracewell was sublime opposite Francesca Hayward’s exquisite phantom, because if Nureyev left a legacy to today’s male dancers, it’s that they can bring every aspect of their psyche to the stage. Not just as charismatic attention magnets, but also vulnerable and broken, artists in the round.
