Featured White Papers
- Oct. 14th: Simplified IT with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (ZDNet)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
- The rise of Web commuting (Citrix Online)
Content provided in partnership with
Nureyev Saluted on Film and TV - Rudolf Nureyev's filmed performances - Brief Article
Dance Magazine, Sept, 2000 by Harris Green
To celebrate the thirty-ninth anniversary of Rudolf Nureyev's defection to the West, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in June offered four programs of his filmed and videotaped performances. PBS plans to telecast the program--This Is NUREYEV!--this fall; check with your local station to learn when it will air in your area.
This tribute, prepared in cooperation with the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation, Lichtenstein, proved eerily well timed. When the program opened at Lincoln Center, Talk magazine had just carried an interview with Peter Martins, ballet master in chief at New York City Ballet, in which he exclaimed about the surprisingly bad dancing of a superstar of thirty-five years ago that he had recently viewed on TV. Nureyev wasn't specified, but he certainly fit that time frame.
Viewers can now judge for themselves how "bad" he was early in his long career. The tribute ranges from a rare tape of a 1958 Kirov student solo from Le Corsaire on a mixed bill of selections to Pierre Jourdan's documentary I Am a Dancer and the freshly re-mastered film of the Australian Ballet's Don Quixote, both from 1972. Even balletgoers weary of the relentless high jinks in Don Q should still admire Geoffrey Unsworth's glowing cinematography, Lucette Aldous's tireless Kitri and the alert framing of the dancing, often in long takes, by co-directors Nureyev and Robert Helpmann.
Nureyev's golden years at The Royal Ballet are captured in Paul Czinner's 1965 film of Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. A stilted affair, like all of Czinner's multi-camera productions, it's still a valuable record of Nureyev's extraordinary partnership with Margot Fonteyn. The screen does her no favors, but her great dancing-acting dominates the final scene.
Neither film nor tape can recapture the electricity Nureyev's very presence generated onstage. Nothing can erase the painful memory of his last years as a performer long past his prime. These programs, however, should cement the memory of the young Rudolf Nureyev as a historic force in dance that was all to the good.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Dance Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
