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Then there is Rudolf Nureyev. Onstage he is bigger than life. In life he is barely 5 ft. 8 in., a lithe, finely muscled 160 Ibs. He has the look of a petulant faun—pouting mouth, sharp features, hollow cheeks—topped off with a shaggy, leonine swirl of hair that looks as if it had been combed with an electric mixer. He trims it himself, with toenail clippers. Says Ballerina Sonia Arova: "Whenever we are dancing together, I spend all my offstage time pinning up his hair and spraying it. He feels it is very poetic." One unimpressed critic dismissed him as "the senior member of the Rolling Stones."
To all critics, Nureyev has a stock reply: "I am Nureyev, dancer, nothing more than that. I am on sale. It is free enterprise. If you like, you buy. If you don't like, you leave alone."
On Wire. His incredibly high, arching jumps always bring a gasp from the audience. With head back, one arm extended to point the course, he effortlessly lifts off and then, as he says, "I fly." His trajectory is beyond the proper limits of the body. At the apex of his elevation he hangs in mid-air for one long impossible crucial moment, as if suspended by piano wire, before making his feathery descent. His legs scissoring like hummingbird wings, he can rocket four feet straight up in the air with just the slightest bend of his coiled-spring legs.
Nureyev carries with him a magnetic atmosphere full of electricity and surprise, some hint of inscrutable purpose that makes his simple presence the most significant fact of the ballet. His style is marked by a sublime ellipsis in tempo, an aerial freedom, a sense of allegro melancholy. His transitions within a variation are pure and unlabored, most wonderfully in La Bayadère, a kind of balletic obstacle course that has become his personal tour de force.
He has his faults. His characterization tends to be too generalized, his stage behavior occasionally undisciplined. And sometimes, in the fury of his involvement, his interpretation becomes overly mannered, his arms too soft and pretty. "I saw Rudi and Margot dance in Giselle one night," says a male dancer, "and I couldn't tell which was the ballerina."
Beyond all that, Nureyev possesses a mysterious charismatic gift called presence. Callas has it. Richard Burton has it. It is an animal magnetism, an ineffable, extrasensory something that rivets all eyes on Nureyev, whether he is center stage or obscured in the shadows. Just standing still, he is an exclamation point.
Perfect Relation. Some of his presence has rubbed off on Fonteyn's classical technique, lending a new tingle to her Picasso-like purity of line. "Something quite special happens when we dance together," says Fonteyn. "It's odd, because it's nothing we've discussed or worked on, yet there in the photos both heads will be tilted to exactly the same angle, both in perfect geometric relationship to each other."