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| Rudolf Nureyev |
Today, The Grandma is still playing with her new Space Invaders machine. She is a little exhausted after playing without stopping during hours and after having realized that the Anti Christ has returned to manage her current city during four more years. She is ready to fight against this cynic egocentric fake figure without surrender.
The Grandma has decided to watch something to relax herself and she has chosen some ballet performances of one of her two favourite dancers, Rudolf Nureyev -the other is Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Nureyev lived the years of the Cold War, the period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states (the Eastern Bloc), and the United States with its allies (the Western Bloc) after World War II. He defected from the Soviet Union on a day like today in 1961.
Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev, in Tatar Рудольф Хәмит улы Нуриев (17 March 1938-6 January 1993) was a Soviet ballet and contemporary dancer and choreographer.
Named Lord of the Dance, Nureyev is widely regarded as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation.
Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union to a Tatar Muslim family. Nureyev began his early career with the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg.
He defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961, despite KGB efforts to stop him. This was the first defection of a Soviet artist during the Cold War and it created an international sensation.
He went on to dance with The Royal Ballet in London and from 1983 to 1989 served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet. In addition to his technical prowess, Rudolf Nureyev was an accomplished choreographer serving as the chief choreographer of the Paris Opera Ballet. He produced his own interpretations of numerous classical works, including Swan Lake, Giselle, and La Bayadère.
More information: The Rudolf Nureyev Foundation
Rudolf Nureyev was born on a Trans-Siberian train near Irkutsk, Siberia, Soviet Union, while his mother, Farida, was travelling to Vladivostok, where his father Khamet, a Red Army political commissar, was stationed. He was raised as the only son with three older sisters in a Tatar Muslim family.
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| Rudolf Nureyev in 1961 |
When his mother took Nureyev and his sisters into a performance of the ballet Song of the Cranes, he fell in love with dance. As a child he was encouraged to dance in Bashkir folk performances and his precocity was soon noticed by teachers who encouraged him to train in Saint Petersburg, named as Leningrad 1924–1991.
On a tour stop in Moscow with a local ballet company, Nureyev auditioned for the Bolshoi ballet company and was accepted. However, he felt that the Mariinsky Ballet school was the best, so he left the local touring company and bought a ticket to St. Petersburg.
Owing to the disruption of Soviet cultural life caused by World War II, Nureyev was unable to enroll in a major ballet school until 1955, aged 17, when he was accepted by the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet of Saint Petersburg, the associate school of the Mariinsky Ballet. The ballet master Alexander Ivanovich Pushkin took an interest in him professionally and allowed Nureyev to live with him and his wife.
Upon his graduation in 1958, Nureyev joined the Kirov Ballet, now Mariinsky. He moved immediately beyond the corps level, and was given solo roles as a principal dancer from the outset. Rudolf Nureyev regularly partnered Dudinskaya, the company's senior ballerina and the wife of its director, Konstantin Sergeyev. Natalia Dudinskaya, 26 years his senior, chose him as her partner in the ballet Laurencia.
More information: BBC
Before long Rudolf Nureyev became one of the Soviet Union's best-known dancers. From 1958 to 1961, in his three years with the Mariinsky, he danced 15 roles, usually opposite his partner, Ninel Kurgapkina, with whom he was very well paired, although she was almost a decade older than he was.
Nureyev and Kurgapkina were invited to dance at a gathering at Khrushchev's dacha, and in 1959 they were allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union, dancing in Vienna at the International Youth Festival. Not long after, he was told by the Ministry of Culture that he would not be allowed to go abroad again. In one memorable incident, Nureyev interrupted a performance of Don Quixote for 40 minutes, insisting on dancing in tights and not in the customary trousers. He relented in the end, but his preferred dress code was adopted in later performances.
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| Rudolf Nureyev & Zizi Jeanmarie, 1966 |
By the late 1950s, Rudolf Nureyev had become a sensation in the Soviet Union.
Yet, as the Mariinsky Ballet was preparing to go on a tour to Paris and London, Nureyev's rebellious character and a non-conformist attitude made him an unlikely candidate for a trip to the West, which was to be of crucial importance to the Soviet government's ambitions to portray what they felt was their cultural supremacy. Furthermore, tensions between Rudolf Nureyev and the Mariinsky's artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev, husband and former dance partner of Natalia Dudinskaya, were growing. After a representative of the French tour organizers saw Nureyev dance in Leningrad in 1960, the French organizers urged Soviet authorities to let him dance in Paris, and he was allowed to go.
Yet, as the Mariinsky Ballet was preparing to go on a tour to Paris and London, Nureyev's rebellious character and a non-conformist attitude made him an unlikely candidate for a trip to the West, which was to be of crucial importance to the Soviet government's ambitions to portray what they felt was their cultural supremacy. Furthermore, tensions between Rudolf Nureyev and the Mariinsky's artistic director Konstantin Sergeyev, husband and former dance partner of Natalia Dudinskaya, were growing. After a representative of the French tour organizers saw Nureyev dance in Leningrad in 1960, the French organizers urged Soviet authorities to let him dance in Paris, and he was allowed to go.
Nureyev was seen to have broken the rules about mingling with foreigners and allegedly frequented gay bars in Paris, which alarmed the Mariinsky's management and the KGB agents observing him. The KGB wanted to send him back to the Soviet Union.
More information: The Guardian
On 16 June 1961, the Mariinsky group had gathered at Le Bourget Airport in Paris to fly to London. Sergeyev then took Nureyev aside and told him that he would have to return to Moscow, for a special performance in the Kremlin. Nureyev became suspicious and refused. Next he was told that his mother had fallen severely ill and he needed to come home immediately to see her. Nureyev refused again, believing that on return to the USSR he was likely to be imprisoned. With the help of French police and a Parisian socialite friend -Clara Saint, who had been engaged to the son of the French Minister of Culture Andre Malraux- Nureyev got away from his KGB minders and asked for asylum. Sergeyev and the KGB tried to discuss it with him but he chose to stay in Paris.
Within a week, he was signed up by the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas and was performing The Sleeping Beauty with Nina Vyroubova. On a tour of Denmark he met Erik Bruhn, soloist at the Royal Danish Ballet who became his lover, his closest friend and his protector until Bruhn's death in 1986.
Soviet authorities made Nureyev's father, mother and dance teacher Pushkin write letters to him, urging him to return, without effect. Although he petitioned the Soviet government for many years to be allowed to visit his mother, he was not allowed to do so until 1987, when his mother was dying and Mikhail Gorbachev consented to the visit.
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| Rudolf Nureyev |
In 1989, he was invited to dance the role of James in La Sylphide with the Mariinsky Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. The visit gave him the opportunity to see many of the teachers and colleagues he had not seen since his defection.
In 1982, Nureyev became a naturalized citizen of Austria. In 1983, he was appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, where, as well as directing, he continued to dance and to promote younger dancers. He remained there as a dancer and chief choreographer until 1989. His artistic directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet was a great success, lifting the company out of a dark period.
When AIDS appeared in France's news around 1982, Nureyev took little notice. The dancer tested positive for HIV in 1984, but for several years he simply denied that anything was wrong with his health. However, by the late 1980s his diminished capabilities disappointed his admirers who had fond memories of his outstanding prowess and skill. Nureyev began a marked decline only in the summer of 1991 and entered the final phase of the disease in the spring of 1992.
In March 1992, living with advanced AIDS, he visited Kazan and appeared as a conductor in front of the audience at Musa Cälil Tatar Academic Opera and Ballet Theater, which now presents the Rudolf Nureyev Festival in Tatarstan.
More information: The Irish Times
Returning to Paris, with a high fever, he was admitted to the hospital Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Levallois-Perret, a suburb northwest of Paris, and was operated on for pericarditis, an inflammation of the membranous sac around the heart.
At that time, what inspired him to fight his illness was the hope that he could fulfill an invitation to conduct Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at an American Ballet Theatre benefit on 6 May 1992 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He did so and was elated at the reception.
At that time, what inspired him to fight his illness was the hope that he could fulfill an invitation to conduct Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at an American Ballet Theatre benefit on 6 May 1992 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He did so and was elated at the reception.
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| Rudolf Nureyev |
Nureyev had managed to obtain a photocopy of the original score by Minkus when in Russia in 1989. The ballet was a personal triumph although the gravity of his condition was evident. The French Culture Minister, Jack Lang, presented him that evening on stage with France's highest cultural award, the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Nureyev re-entered the hospital Notre Dame du Perpétuel Secours in Levallois-Perret on 20 November 1992 and remained there until his death from AIDS complications at age 54 on 6 January 1993.
His funeral was held in the marble foyer of the Paris Garnier Opera House. Many paid tributes to his brilliance as a dancer. One such tribute came from Oleg Vinogradov of the Mariinsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia, stating: What Nureyev did in the west, he could never have done here.
More information: Stars & Stripes
Nureyev's grave, at a Russian cemetery in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris, features a tomb draped in a mosaic of an oriental carpet. Nureyev was an avid collector of beautiful carpets and antique textiles. As his coffin was lowered into the ground, music from the last act of Giselle was played and his ballet shoes were cast into the grave along with white lilies.
After so many years of having been denied a place in the Mariinsky Ballet history, Nureyev's reputation was restored. His name was reentered in the history of the Mariinsky and some of his personal effects were placed on display at the theatre museum in St. Petersburg.
At the famed Vaganova Academy a rehearsal room was named in his honour. As of October 2013, the Centre National du Costume de Scene has a permanent collection of Nureyev's costumes that offers visitors a sense of his exuberant, vagabond personality and passion for all that was rare and beautiful. In 2015, he was inducted into the Legacy Walk.
At the Paris Opera there is a tradition to organize a dance night as homage to Rudolf Nureyev every ten years after he died in 1993. The homage to Nureyev was scheduled on 20 March 2003 and on 6 March 2013 respectively because he was born in March.
More information: English Heritage
For me, purity of movement wasn't enough.
I needed expression, more intensity, more mind.
Rudolf Nureyev
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