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.
