" It is an even more amazing tale: a poor provincial boy astonishes everyone with his dancing, joins the Kirov ballet company, goes on tour with them, thrills Paris, is fingered by the KGB, defects spectacularly and, at 23, takes the West by storm partnering its greatest ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, aged 42. As Ms Kavanagh shows, Nureyev hit every contemporary button: communist repression v Western freedom, swinging London, the cult of youth, celebrity, fashion, sex (straight and gay) and finally, in a horrible coda, AIDS. The period is virtually stamped in his wild boy, androgynous, Tatar image."
From The Economist, of all places, reviewing Julie Kavanaugh's Rudolf Nureyev: The Life. [Rather than, Nureyev: His Life by Diane Solway, I suppose; how the women fight over him!]
Also pleasing, the reviewer takes the opportunity to take that pushy, ignorant half-breed, Carlos Acosta, down a peg. After starting her review by quoting him thusly:
"Acosta was blank: who was Nureyev? Angry at his ignorance, his friend proclaimed that Nureyev was a genius and the reason they were both there. “What bullshit!”, Mr Acosta thinks, “I'm here thanks to my [negro] father, to Chery [his teacher] and my legs.”
the reviewer turns to the Nureyev book and then concludes:
"Yet, after reading Ms Kavanagh's book, one recognises the landscape, the whole vocabulary within which [the mulatto-come-lately] works. [T]he lengthened lines, the split extensions, the arched feet, the graceful arms and back, the whole magic package of strength and grace is Nureyev's legacy."
The whole magic package, indeed. Good thing the reviewer is anonymous; Larry Clark will be very pissed! Imagine, a white man dancing!
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