Admiration in Place of Analysis

...Nureyev is praised by Percival for accenting what he calls the underlying story of the birth of the god and for the "cutting edge" the dancer gave the steps, yet for many attuned to the nature of Balanchine's New York City Ballet, Nureyev's "excellence of pure dance irradiated by such humanity" was not an unqualified "rare pleasure...

...But this comment is hardly sufficient since the question is not one of competition...

...In one picture after another, Nureyev's face leaps out at the reader...

...His earlier books, The World of Diaghilev and Modern Ballet, astutely examined two important eras of dance history...

...Nonetheless, Nureyev: Aspects of the Dancer contains a wealth of absorbing detail, and its 32 pages of black-and-white photographs offer a clue to the problem Percival confronted...

...Percivai poignantly describes the 37-year-old dancer, legs swollen with bandages beneath his tights, face and body almost imperceptibly tightened in pain, flinging himself into the most pyrotechnical of roles...

...He makes the curious observation that since most of Nureyev's modern-dance roles were created for specific people, he cannot be expected to improve on the originators, no matter how well he dances...

...The very hard-edged attack that Percival applauds was thought to lend a quite un-Balanchinian isolation to the individual movements...

...There is, too, a clear but unstated comparison of his early Western period with the current one of the relatively recent young Kirov defector, Mikhail Baryshnikov...

...Similar points have been raised about Nureyev's ballet performances...

...BPeroival admits, somewhat ingenuously, that he has great trouble choosing the Nureyev roles he would rate as the outstanding ones...

...Your name?' he asked, and pretended to write it down, then offered the imaginary document to the dancer with the explanation 'Your pension.' After that, Nureyev had no trouble...

...He tells us he found himself "scribbling down one name after another...

...By dealing as well with the changes the dancer has since undergone, the author illuminates some of the differences between Soviet and Western balletic tradition and style...

...In fact, its strength lies in its grimly romantic picture of a formidable artist racing time...

...Still, one might pause to wonder whether this perseverance is the unadulterated energy of a great artist, or merely overweening pride...

...Reviewed by Jennifer Dunning No dancer or choreographer has done so much to popularize what was once considered an esoteric art as Rudolf Nureyev...

...This is unfortunate since his judgment, given his background and his unsurpassed view of Nureyev's career, would have been invaluable...

...It may be that the dancer's overwhelming personality, that sense of a "life or death gamble," as the intense Russian has put it, makes him difficult, perhaps impossible, to analyze or penetrate or even to describe...

...He commands the attention of critics and gossip columnists alike through his larger-than-life personality, his curiosity about forms of dance other than the classical ballet he was trained in, and his consuming drive to perform as frequently and in as many parts of the world as possible...

...After all, while Nureyev was the first ballet dancer of international stature to cross the traditional boundaries and perform modern dance—a unique act of courage—his artistic integrity has been challenged by critics who say he has attempted styles he has failed to master...

...Through an exceptional self-sufficiency and belief in himself, Nureyev overcame the handicap of a late start in formal dance study and progressed with unusual speed through the hierarchical systems of the Kirov Ballet, the company he was with at the time of his defection...

...In the back jacket photograph by Rosemary Winokley, the flung line of the legs and arms, ending in tensely curled fingers, the face fierce with the pleasure and effort of the jump and of the impetus through space, remind one of Nureyev's remark that, unlike Western dance, Soviet dance is concerned less with form than with emotional coloration...

...He also offers touching stories of Nureyev's deprived, lonely childhood, of his early exposure to dance, and of the rebelliousness that continued into adulthood, making him a problem for the Soviet authorities...

...It begins with a biographical section, follows with a close look at its subject's moment-to-moment activities over a period of several work days, moves to a set of testimonials from colleagues, and closes with an appraisal...

...Percivai gives an invaluable chronological listing of Nureyev's roles and productions, from his days in Leningrad through his appearance last spring in a work by Martha Graham...

...Some writers, for instance, have suggested the dancer's expressiveness and very specific and compelling feel for mass are incompatible with the light, springing, quick reversals of the Danish Bournonville style...

...The account is both exhaustive and exhausting: From his student years at the Leningrad Ballet School in the mid-'50s, Nureyev has reached out for as many different performing experiences as possible...

...Percivai is the chief ballet editor for the London Times and associate editor of the English monthly Dance and Dancers...

...Nureyev is neatly ordered...

...Percivai scarcely touches upon this problem...

...In this new study, however, the analyst has, for the most part, been displaced by the friend and admirer...

...Others have complained that his Apollo in George Balanchine's major ballet of the same name was overly human, and out of keeping with the choreographer's intentions...

...In the 16 years since his Paris airport defection from the Soviet Union, he has become the first real international ballet star of the jet age...

...At times, Nureyev assumes the mythic proportions of Albrecht, the hero of the ballet classic "Giselle," who was doomed to dance nearly to death...

...In the 1971-72 season, for example, Nureyev took on five new roles in diverse styles with England's Royal Ballet, appeared in Mexico with the modern dance choreographer Paul Taylor, staged and performed his own work in Zurich and Canada, danced with the National Ballet of Canada, and filmed both the documentary I Am a Dancer and his full-length Don Quixote, this last with the Australian Ballet in an aircraft hangar outside Melbourne...

...Its most valuable feature is an up-to-date and detailed history of the dancer's career, with a special emphasis on his activities as a choreographer and reviver of Russian ballet classics...

...And, like a leitmotif, Nureyev's apprehension of impending age, of his career's end, persists throughout the book...

...Yet there have been few works written about Nureyev (the best known may be his autobiography, published 13 years ago, edited by Alexander Bland) and though John Percivai has now attempted a book-length treatment, Nureyev: Aspects of the Dancer is a less important contribution to the literature than one might have hoped...

...Embellishing Percival's narrative are flashes of Nureyev's wry humor, among them his description of one ballerina's legs as "edible," and his method of handling a recalcitrant older dancer in the Vienna Opera Ballet, which operates on a civil service system: "Nureyev called him over...