Glimpse Of Nureyev and Barryshnikov
DUNNING, JENNIFER
OnDance GLIMPSES OF NUREYEV AND BARYSHNIKOV BY JENNIFER DUNNING Ballet is no longer only an art for well-heeled aristocrats. Star performers are often front-page news, the media regularly—and...
...The "film strip" method of photographic reproduction used in several sequences in this lavish volume is therefore most helpful...
...The Nureyev Image (chiefly the work of Gosling) succeeds it...
...Mercutio rather than Romeo...
...It also reveals Nureyev in a moment of special grace...
...Among other things, it provides a welcome breakdown of Twyla Tharp's fleeting, idiosyncratic choreographic style...
...But both men are enthusiastically received...
...But one might like to know who Vestris is...
...I always had the feeling in the beginning that I was out in a boat that had no sail, doing forbidden things...
...Bland, as sympathetic as he is shrewd, explains: Nureyev's "striking, instantly recognizable features have a kind of wild beauty which has made them into romantic pin-ups in many a lonely bedroom...
...His dash for freedom at Paris' Le Bourget airport is vividly described, as is his lonely first year of freedom, when he was regarded as a flamboyant oddity and did little to counteract the impression...
...Leafing through the 300 or so illustrations, one can see the attraction...
...Interpretations of 17 roles are taken up in depth, with pictures and brief background information on 51 additional roles...
...Two new entries are The Nureyev Image (Quadrangle, 288 pp., $15.95), a critical essay by Alexander Bland plus selected photographs, and Baryshnikov at Work (Knopf, 252 pp., $22.50), the artist's reflections on his protean career, with pictures by Martha Swope...
...I'm still in the middle of everything...
...In a brilliant discussion of Petrouchka, Baryshnikov evokes the haunting specter of the mad Nijinsky, the first interpreter of the title role...
...Star performers are often front-page news, the media regularly—and unselfconsciously—reports on the dance, and performances are well-attended by varied and enthusiastic audiences...
...A JLJLLTH0UGH more polished technically than Wilson's pictures, the 450-odd rehearsal and performance photographs by Martha Swope in Baryshnikov at Work are mostly a straightforward account of a career...
...Coppelius, the crabbed puppetmaker of Coppelia...
...Bland, an admitted partisan, is not critical enough of Nureyev's choreography and interpretations...
...Charles Engell France, the editor of Baryshnikov at Work, describes the book as a document of development and exploration...
...I can just try to say what I feel now...
...Here Bland provides valuable historical material spiced with his own judicious analysis and richly detailed descriptions of the different ballets...
...The feel of a movement rather than its appearance, "the velocity of a curve or a jump rather than its height, the plastic harmony of a position, what he calls 'juiciness' in a movement" are the principles of Nureyev's style, Bland tells us...
...I was to wear jazz shoes...
...Speculation on his future would have been welcome from so informed a source as Bland, too...
...Baryshnikov is a far more reticent dancer...
...But in the classics he heaps one technical feat upon another, so that the choreographic sum is frequently hard to analyze...
...His awesome personal magnetism compensates for slips into inelegance and occasional raggedness at the finish of some pyrotechnical feat...
...Not surprisingly, ballet's expanded following has created a fresh market for dance books: accounts of the making of ballets and ballet films, fat encyclopedias, technical tomes, even diaries of baby ballerinas...
...Never look back," Bland quotes him...
...Within the art, the technical level has reached new heights, particularly in the now important area of male dancing...
...Baryshnikov at Work helps solve the mystery of a man who abandons himself to space but remains aloof in the process...
...The books are handsome, penetrating and, like their subjects, offer intri-guingly complementary views of dancing...
...Telling commentary on Vestris, for example, is to be treasured...
...We see Nureyev applying make-up, working out backstage and affectionately hugging colleagues...
...In the process, he reveals himself to be an engagingly modest and intelligent observer...
...This he does in a series of reflections on the art and on the 26 roles he has played since his 1974 defection...
...Dancing Pas de Duke, an equally alien jazz-modern dance duet, he confesses he felt "like a cow on ice...
...A shot of Baryshnikov standing still in Giselle catches his habitual air of intense concentration...
...The selection process must have been exhausting, but it was obviously carried out with great affection...
...And what a dance critic he might make...
...and a telling compendium of puppet poses from Petrouchka...
...A dancer of great clarity, Baryshnikov never slurs steps or combinations...
...Unfortunately, the total absence of both plot and character descriptions may prevent the novice enthusiast from fully appreciating Baryshnikov's charm...
...Still, Baryshnikov at Work is a sunny and at times very moving view of ballet from behind the footlights...
...He was more than merely a colorful celebrity, though...
...a record of Vestris, an odd Russian dramatic solo created expressly for Baryshnikov and seldom seen here...
...Like The Nureyev Image, it is worthy of the most polished coffee tables and, more important, makes good reading for all dance enthusiasts...
...Nureyev is all dionysian fire...
...That was the last straw...
...Nevertheless, Swope captures Baryshnikov's characteristic qualities—his moments of playfulness, his terrier attack on choreography, a model attentiveness in partnering, his vitality and crystalline line...
...A shot by English critic-photographer G. B. L. Wilson of Nureyev's soaring leap in Jerome Robbins' Dances at a Gathering is exquisite, capturing the blend of the earthy and the numinous that gives the ballet its curious flavor...
...Unlike Nureyev and emigree Natalia Ma-karova, the young dancer has eagerly sought out new styles, although he continues to perform the classics for which he, Makarova and Nureyev are justly famous...
...In the cover picture (from Alvin Ailey's Pas de Duke) Baryshnikov, head thrown back, strides through a dance mode completely foreign to him...
...And just the night before we began to rehearse, Alvin [Aileyl called and told me to please not wear ballet slippers...
...These developments are in great part attributable to the work of two dancers: Rudolf Nureyev, who 15 years ago broke away from his Kirov colleagues at a Paris airport to defect to the West, and recent emigre Mikhail Baryshnikov...
...That brave and inquisitive pose is symptomatic of Baryshnikov's attitude toward his art...
...The result, an unbridled energy, is evident even in the early student snapshots...
...A wide variety of established and new dance photographers are represented...
...His trenchant descriptions of the physical characteristics of works by Tharp, Rdbbins and Balanchine are as insightful as most criticism written on the three masters...
...Teacher Vera Volkova thought Nureyev "something of a genius— he has the nostrils," and he was the first Russian Margot Fonteyn had ever seen laugh...
...A creature of impulse and contradictions, a piquant—and touching—mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated, Nureyev has attracted a celebrated clutch of adoring fanatics...
...By the end of that first year, largely on his own counsel, he had danced with companies in France, Germany, England, America, and Italy...
...Some of his embellishments are steps never before viewed by Western audiences...
...There seems to be a great deal of undistinguished floor space showing...
...The first and hitherto most authoritative work on Nureyev was written soon after his 1962 defection, also by Alexander Bland (the psuedonym of Maude Lloyd and Nigel Gosling, a husband-and-wife dance-criticism team for the London Observer...
...A biographical sketch begins with Nureyev's hungry early years, then moves on to the "skinny, solitary and sharp-tongued" young student...
...Who would have imagined that Baryshnikov worries as he dances Swan Lake that someone in the audience is thinking what he thought as a young ballet student: " 'Oh, Lord, why isn't it over?'" Light-heartedness probably saved him during what must have been a bewildering past two years...
...The two have dramatically different styles...
...His thoughts on the symbolism of the lilies in Giselle bring new life to that venerable classic...
...The narrative of Nureyev's career, from the performing and restaging of ballet classics to his later explorations of the alien techniques of master modern dance choreographers Martha Graham and Paul Taylor, will be of particular interest to the afficdonado who has seen the works discussed...
...To be sure, the technique astounds, yet it is often executed with a calm suggesting that the 28-year-old former star of the Kirov Ballet, considered a formidable technician even in his Leningrad schooldays, has worked out a private puzzle and made a gift of its solution...
...That way you fall downstairs...
...As you are dancing," he writes of his first experience with the fragmented Tharp style, "you feel like a fish in the sand...
...I don't want to make pronouncements," Baryshnikov told France in the conversations that make up the bulk of the text...
...Bland is a seasoned, urbane writer and the text is absorbing reading...
...I thought, 'Oh, Alvin, give me one last chance, let me keep my dancing shoes.'" Reading the book we discover that underneath the dazzling technician lurks the soul of a dramatic dancer, one who would like to do some "character" roles—the Hoff-mannesque Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker...
...Many of the pictures are more art than chronicle...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 3
