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Clear out your TiVos: There’s a program on Russian culture to record tomorrow night.
On Wednesday, August 29 at 9 p.m. eastern, the PBS series “Great Performances” will air a documentary on the early years of the great Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Using archival footage and KGB files, John Bridcut, the film’s writer and producer has come up with a portrait of the dancer prior to his defection to the West in Paris in 1961. Nureyev’s dancing gave new importance to the roles of male dancers in classical ballet, and his off-stage socializing with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Andy Warhol paved the way for dancers to be celebrities on a grand scale. I don’t think his defection made it any easier for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974, but you could argue that one wouldn’t have happened without the precedent set by the other.
While there have been plenty of works on Nureyev after he came to the West, the new film focuses on his time with the Kirov Ballet. Nureyev was born in Irkutsk to a Tatar family migrating east to Vladivostok and didn’t go to a major ballet school until he was 17. He became a star in the Soviet Union and abroad almost immediately.
I haven’t seen the show yet, but several newspaper reporters have been given previews and you can find several write-ups of the film on the Internet already. According to the reviewers, the movie makes it clear that Nureyev had decided early on that he was going to be the world’s top ballet dancer. And the movie apparently has plenty of footage of the early years to show how hard he worked at that goal. Some of the film’s research is credited to Julie Kavanagh, a the British writer who has been working on a biography of Nureyev for the last decade. Her book Nureyev: The Life will be published this October.
All this said, I’m going to tape the show and watch it myself before I decide whether to show it to the kids. The film apparently makes it clear that Nureyev’s sexual orientation was one of the reasons for his defection, and that could raise a lot of questions. But for me, the opportunity to see more of Nureyev’s wondrous dancing is too great an opportunity to resist.
