Troubled Tartar

"When I am dancing with him," says Dame Margot Fonteyn, "and I look across the stage, I see not Nureyev but the character of the ballet. I don't see, as I do with others, a man I know and talk to every day. I see the ballet. He is how I would like to be, and he makes it easier for me to dance as I wish."

Margot Fonteyn, a little past her great ballerina days at 43, has found in Russian Dancer Rudolf Nureyev, 24, one of the most satisfactory partners of her career. They make quite a pair. Seventeen months have now passed since he defected in Paris from the Kirov Ballet company of Leningrad (TIME, June 23, 1961). Dancing with Fonteyn, Nureyev has gained in control and assurance without losing any of the instinctive stage sense that made him an immediate hit. Audiences seem absorbed with every movement of his small, compact body, every expression of his high-cheekboned face. When he has completed a flourish of movements, he has a trick of presenting himself to the audience with shoulders thrown back and arms outstretched, calling for the ovation that never fails to come. His ability to rivet attention on himself--whether in a soaring lift, a pantherlike leap, or a flamboyant succession of jetes--is so marked that resident dancers gather in the wings to watch.

Nijinsky & James Dean. In London and on the Continent, the only classical male dancer who can match Nureyev's popularity is Denmark's Erik Bruhn. Pale, hollow-cheeked and shaggy-haired, Nureyev radiates a kind of savage excitement that he himself describes as a "mixture of tenderness and brutality." It has prompted comparisons with Nijinsky and even with the late actor James Dean, hero of the beatniks. Unfortunately for the Royal Ballet, Nureyev is like Dean in another respect: he is as complex and difficult an animal offstage as he is on. After giving a superb performance opposite Fonteyn in an electrifying pas de deux from Le Corsaire, Nureyev withdrew from all his scheduled performances.

He said that he had an injured ankle. Granted a leave, Nureyev entered a hospital last week to have a small dislocated ankle bone pushed back into place. But he flatly refused to say which ankle is ailing (it is thought to be his right) for fear audiences would watch for him to favor it. But what specially irked London balletomanes was that Nureyev had already scheduled appearances with the American Ballet Theatre in Chicago during the Christmas season, and would rest up until then. He will not reappear at Covent Garden until mid-January, an absence that has forced postponement of Frederick Ashton's long-awaited new ballet, Marguerite and Armand, written specially for Nureyev and Fonteyn. Said one riled and exasperated Covent Garden official: "I'd rather deal with ten Callases than one Nureyev.''

No Respect. Nureyev ignores his critics, though he realizes that he still has much to learn--and many observers agree with him. In bravura numbers--such as the pas de deux from Le Corsaire or from Bournonville's The Flower Festival of Genzano--his technique is often insecure. Nureyev himself points out that Yuri Soloviev of the Kirov Ballet is a far more polished performer. But what remains undisputed is that no dancer has greater natural gifts than Nureyev, or a more tempestuous temperament.

A natural rebel who was in constant hot water with the directors of the Kirov school, Nureyev became increasingly withdrawn after his defection. He is continually harassed by Russian embassy officials who try to persuade him to return, and for a while his mother called him daily from Russia at Soviet government expense. Nureyev has no apartment of his own in London, in fact has little life of his own at all outside Covent Garden. Away from the dance, says a friend, "he's a monk.''

Nureyev attributes his temperament to the fact that he was born a Tartar, not a Russian. It is his Tartar blood, says Nureyev, that gives him "something in common with wild, untamable animals." What he needs most, and in this even his admirers agree, is a little taming--the kind of rigid discipline that he might well have gotten had he stayed in Russia.

Outside Russia, a star attraction no matter what he does, he might find such discipline only under one of his idols, like George Balanchine of the able but low-budget New York City Ballet.

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