Delightful Dilemmas

As Rudolf Nureyev proclaimed, Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week was "a ballet supermarket," and balletomanes dashed eagerly from aisle to aisle to sample the best offerings. At the New York State Theater, the American Ballet Theater opened a month-long stand featuring the man whom Nureyev considers the finest male dancer in the world: Denmark's Erik Bruhn. Meanwhile, a few grand jetes across the Lincoln Center plaza, London's Royal Ballet twirled past the midpoint of its six-week season at the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Margot Fonteyn and the male dancer whom Nureyev considers second only to Bruhn: Nureyev.

Comparisons were irresistible, but as the week's performances emphasized, Bruhn and Nureyev are not really comparable. Bruhn, a mature 38, has polished his classical style to a peak of powerful precision and expressive economy. In the U.S. premiere of his pas de deux for Romeo and Juliet, he evoked muted strains of Romeo's tragic ardor, but the focus was less on his characterization than on the discipline of his whippet leaps and turns and the flawless flow of his carries with Italy's graceful Carla Fracci. Marveled Nureyev: "His technique is too good to be believed."

New Medium. The 29-year-old Nureyev, on the other hand, still triumphs through personal magnetism and the passionate abandon of his spectacularly athletic portrayals. As Adam in the first New York performance of Roland Petit's acrobatic modern parable, Paradise Lost, he bounced, somersaulted and writhed with fiery grace against a backdrop of pop-art settings--and at one point took a breathtaking dive between the painted lips on a huge poster of Eve's face (TIME, March 3). "He keeps revealing new sides," said Bruhn. "Paradise Lost is a new medium for him, very good for him."

Besides pitting Bruhn and Nureyev against each other, the two companies squared off with competing full-length versions of the seemingly inexhaustible classic, Swan Lake. Here the Americans scored an ironic coup, for their production was staged by a premier danseur of the Royal Ballet, David Blair. By going back largely to the seminal 1895 production in St. Petersburg, Blair restored the choreographic brilliance of the work; but he also added dances of his own and reshuffled the story with a knowing eye for drama. The result--handsomely mounted and costumed--was not only the most substantial Swan Lake in years but also consistently cohesive and convincing theater.

Musty & Misty. By contrast, much of the Royal Ballet production looked musty as well as misty. Yet in the fervent fluidity of their corps de ballet, and particularly in the incandescent performances of Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, the Londoners had an asset that the Ballet Theater version, ably danced as it was, could not match. Dame Margot, 48 this week, has distilled the Odette-Odile role to a consummate purity. She did not seem to project it so much as to be devoured by it, until it was almost impossible, in Yeats's words, to "know the dancer from the dance."

As if this were not enough for the comparison shoppers, the troupes presented duplicate performances of other works as well. Notably, there was Igor Stravinsky's ritualistic mosaic of a Russian peasant wedding, Les Noces, which the Royal Ballet gave earlier in the for mal, restrained version by Bronislava Nijinska. Last week the Ballet Theater showed off Jerome Robbins' dazzling choreography for it in a vigorous, soulful ensemble tour de force. The Americans also drew 17 curtain calls when they unveiled Eliot Feld's Harbinger, a lively and neatly dovetailed abstraction set to Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto. It was a week of delightful dilemmas for the audiences, but nobody had more fun with it than the dancers themselves.

On their nights off, they crossed over regularly to watch the competition at work. Bruhn and Nureyev not only caught each other's performances, but also worked out in classes together and occasionally took off on the town. And lest anyone make too much of the rivalry between them and their companies, Nureyev spoke for everybody when he said: "We don't clash. We have different things to say."

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