Barefoot Nureyev

A year ago, only a clairvoyant could have predicted that Ballet Dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov would be this season's top box office draws in Manhattan. Yet tickets are scarce as unicorns at Manhattan's City Center for American Ballet Theater's 35th anniversary festivities featuring Baryshnikov, the Leningrad Kirov Ballet's latest runaway genius, whose ability to leap and hang serenely in air drives audiences to frenzy. A few blocks south, teenagers, housewives and businessmen --many of whom have never seen ballet before--pour through the doors of Broadway's Uris Theater, where Nureyev propels himself through four ballets at each performance of a four-week 34-show tarantella called "Nureyev & Friends." If dance is fast becoming the most popular and most highly creative art in the U.S., New York is already the dance capital of the world.

Dance Explosion. The one person most responsible for the dance explosion in America is Nureyev, whose leap through the Iron Curtain 13 years ago triggered a potent curiosity about dance in the public psyche. George Balanchine, doyen of choreographers, pronounced Nureyev oldfashioned, and as usual he was right. For Nureyev immediately set about restoring the male to early 19th century heliocentric prominence. There was nothing middling about his spirit: he was a real-life Albrecht right out of Giselle with a rampaging case of the willies.

Nureyev's determination is nowhere more evident than in class with Stanley Williams, a coach at the School of the American Ballet. Dressed in thick gray leg warmers and a tired white leotard, Nureyev looks sloppier than the rest. A pianist pumps out This Nearly Was Mine while the class practices rapid combination exercises that end in a burst of squeaking slippers. Nureyev finishes last. Working very slowly, he clears an envelope of space round him in which each ringer, each joint, every muscle locates its place. "Keep the arms closer to the body for balance and to project to the audience," Williams reminds him as he misses a turn. He fails in a second try and bangs his head in disgust. "I'm sorry, I will improve," Nureyev apologizes. Pale with concentration, he repeats the step with needle-sharp precision. Williams nods and his pupil jigs back and forth in fifth position like a gleeful schoolboy.

But at 36, often limping at the end of rehearsal, Nureyev is aware that tune is intruding. "The years pass quickly. I am just starting to recognize right from left, and suddenly I have a slight anxiety that it will soon be over," he told TIME Staff Writer Joan Downs. "There are warning bells. My father said you don't see men dancing after 40."

Night after night Nureyev makes a reckless expenditure of resources that he claims casts off the restraints of the body. Supported by a handpicked, high-caliber company that includes Principal Ballerina Merle Park of the Royal Ballet, Modern Dancer-Choreographer Louis Falco and members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, Nureyev has programmed an ambitious mix of diverse styles ranging from demi-pointe to barefoot. Not the least of the challenges are the rapid-fire transformations from Balanchine's neoclassical Apollo to the romantic rustic in Bournonville's pas de deux from the Flower Festival in Genzano and, eventually, into the crazed moor of Limon's The Moor's Pavane.

Surprising Humility. Few artists successfully cross the frontier from classical to modern dance. Never has Nureyev's artistry been more tested than it is in Paul Taylor's Aureole, in which he must suspend the classical dancer's vertical impulse and substitute the modern dancer's low-lying weight shifts. Nureyev submits to the choreography with surprising humility, subduing his famous high-intensity powers of projection.

In the years since he left Russia, Nureyev has grown rich, commanding up to $10,000 per performance. He is so famous that he cannot remember the last tune he met someone who had not heard of him. He loves the high life, is a ubiquitous guest at jet-set parties. Still, dance is never far from his thoughts. "Every book I read, every film I see, each time I go to the theater," he insists, "it is all to gather information pertinent to the dance. You have to stuff yourself."

In many ways Nureyev is more alone than he was on first coming to the West. He speaks wistfully of the beautiful rivers of Ufa, in Bashkir, where he spent his childhood. It is touching to hear him refer involuntarily to the Leningrad Kirov Ballet as "we." Nearing his peak, today Nureyev dances with the familiar bravado, but also a consistency he did not have ten years ago. Finally willing to jettison his princely plumage, he uncovered a gift for simplicity that makes it seem plausible he will some day be as relaxed dancing with his shoes off as he is now with them on. He makes no predictions about the future except to say that he will be dancing, perhaps one day with his own company. By his estimate, 99% of his energies have always been canalized into the impulse to move. "Oh, God, it sounds heavy," he says, "but I can't deflate it. I beat the hell out of myself because that's where I live, onstage. The truth emerges in that awful confrontation of body and will."

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