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Theater & Dance

Rudolf Nureyev’s art and style are gorgeously revived in Calif. museum exhibit

By Sarah Kaufman,November 06, 2012

View Photo Gallery - : ‘Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance’: More than 70 costumes from the…

SAN FRANCISCO — Imagine the police surprise when, during a routine 1967 raid on a party in the Haight-Ashbury district, they hauled in not only weed and hippies but also two of the world’s most celebrated ballet dancers.

Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn — he in a coat and tie, she in a glamorous white fur — landed in jail after their rooftop arrest. They were just hours removed from the Opera House where they had performed with the Royal Ballet in Roland Petit’s “Paradise Lost,” a work created especially for them.

But while their late-night spree of frugging and bongo playing with a group of fans they’d met backstage was cut short, Nureyev didn’t go silently into the pokey. According to one witness, he “put on quite a show” as he was led to the police van.

The yellowed newspaper clipping about the arrest, displayed in “Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance,” through Feb. 17, 2013, at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, leaves the details of the ballet star’s flamboyant exit to the imagination. But after taking in the high theatricality of his existence illuminated in this exhibit, you can rough in a picture of how Nureyev must have delighted in some playful provocation.

This collection, organized with the Centre National du Costume de Scene in Moulins, France, is more than a parade of about 70 costumes, as well as photographs and film clips from Nureyev’s career. It’s a window into the Russian dancer’s voracious passions. (More’s the pity that this is the show’s only U.S. venue.)

“You live as long as you dance,” Nureyev liked to say. What a salvation dancing must have been for the impoverished Tatar boy growing up in a village near the Urals. If he didn’t always have indoor plumbing or even shoes, folk dancing made up for it. When his natural talent vaulted him from local stages to Leningrad’s Vaganova Academy, the training arm of the esteemed Kirov (now Mariinsky) Ballet, the scrawny youngster was brash enough to boast to his more privileged classmates that one day, he would be the world’s greatest ballet dancer.

On looks alone, Nureyev seemed destined to fulfill his aim. One of the exhibit’s photos, a 1963 profile, invites lingering wonder at his features, ideal for long-range visibility: the broad brow and prominent ski-slope nose descending to pillowy lips; his expressive almond-shaped eyes and thick, dark hair sprouting energetic cowlicks fore and aft. It’s a face with Katharine Hepburn qualities, tilted defiantly at the world, all broad planes and chiseled peaks.

Of course, the great treasure was that leonine body and the soaring flights Nureyev could achieve with it. A 1966 photo from the ballet “Le Jeune Homme et la Mort” draws the eye to the dancer’s broad chest, the great curve of his shoulder and its rolling hills of muscle. With Nureyev’s 1961 defection in Paris — a Soviet public relations disaster, coming just weeks after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space — affairs on Earth were forever changed.

Before Nureyev, one scarcely took note of male ballet dancers. Ballerinas were the stars. After him, ballet came into balance. He made it sexier and more electrifying, and male dancers everywhere stood a little taller. Technical standards rose, and the male range expanded, as audiences and choreographers reacted to new possibilities.

Offstage, too, Nureyev shook things up. He was a notorious partyer, set fashion trends with his boots, scarves and leather caps, and while he was more or less private about his homosexuality, as the times dictated, it was not a secret. The man was never given to confinement. As his arrest with Fonteyn illustrates, he was thrillingly beyond shaming — rightly so — and when under scrutiny, he’d put on a show.

What survives of this free spirit, since his death in 1993? The artifacts of dance can never substitute for the real thing, but in the face of human mortality one takes what one can get. Films are one thing, but there’s also value in the objects. The tangibles a dance artist leaves behind can conjure the living experience in the mind just as much as any historical relic — chair, painting, suit of armor — can suggest about any given time or event. With its custom-made silk and velvet garments, in an array of rich, vigorous colors, “Rudolf Nureyev: A Life in Dance” offers suggestion and even revelation about the man’s life that I am grateful to have seen.

Nureyev’s partnership with Fonteyn, the aging queen of the Royal Ballet who found a deeply harmonious partnership and renewed career with the fiery young Russian, is illustrated in several displays. One is devoted to the ballet “Marguerite and Armand,” created for the pair by the great Frederick Ashton. The frailness of Fonteyn’s character, a febrile courtesan reliving a hot romance, is echoed in the delicacy of her gowns, with their transparent overlay atop airy ruffles. The look is part belle of the ball, part sylph.