With his electrifying leaps and volatile personality - both onstage and off - Rudolf Nureyev changed the role of the male ballet dancer for all time. A star from the moment of his celebrated defection in 1961, Nureyev was an instant sensation in the dance world, the first male ballet performer to become an international sex symbol. His storied partnership with Dame Margot Fonteyn lives in the memory of all who saw them.
In later years, well past his peak, Nureyev led a succession of international dance ensembles across the world's stages. At an age when most dancers have long retired, Nureyev continued performing because, as Otis Stuart tells us, for Nureyev, to dance was to live. After a brilliant reign as both star and enfant terrible, however, Nureyev's last years were marked by controversy and turmoil in his tenure as director of the Paris Opera Ballet. At the same time, he was dying of AIDS, a fact that he never publicly acknowledged.
Now, for the first time, Perpetual Motion shows us the two sides of Nureyev - public and private - as they have never been seen before.
From his impoverished childhood in a village in Stalinist Russia to his early days with the Kirov Ballet - where his rebellious behavior was widely enough known to catch the interest of the KGB, which began a file on him - Nureyev's early years would shape his later life. The terror of Stalinism taught him to keep his private life secret, especially since his homosexuality could have landed him in prison or worse.
In fact, reports Otis Stuart, it may have been Nureyev's homosexuality, as much as his desire for creative freedom, that caused his sensational "leap to freedom" at the Paris airport in 1961.
It was shortly after his defection that Nureyev met two people who would change his life: Erik Bruhn, then the reigning male dancer in the West (soon to become Nureyev's lover, even as Nureyev displaced him in the public imagination), and Dame Margot Fonteyn, who, at forty-two, seemed an unlikely partner for the volatile young Russian. Their partnership became legendary, and Stuart gives us new details on Nureyev's fiery and devoted friendship with Fonteyn.
Stuart shows us Nureyev at his peak, always rehearsing, impatient with those unwilling to work as hard as he, and - haunted by his impoverished childhood - wealthy and ever acquisitive (at his death he owned seven homes around the world). Disclosing that Nureyev had likely been HIV-positive for a decade before his death, Stuart makes us appreciate all the more Nureyev's astonishing vitality in his final years.
