Nureyev the grand star comes down to earth
By Bruce Emond
JAKARTA (JP): Put it down to a touch of exaggeration derived from nostalgia and love when one of the commentators in Nureyev: The Last Ten Years, a film which is part of the current exhibit of memorabilia of the late dancer at the National Museum, remarks, "He was bigger than Elvis, bigger than the Beatles" when he defected from the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.
Yet while he was never as high in the fame stakes around the world as the pride of Memphis and Merseyside, Rudolf Nureyev was a name in Europe, the U.S. and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. Handsome, mysterious and flamboyant, he transcended his throne in ballet to become a celebrity in his own right.
He hobnobbed with British royalty, partied on down at New York's legendary Studio 54 and became a fixture of the people pages. AIDS ended his life at the age of 55 in 1993.
Today, in the no-holds-barred world of Eminem and bodacious Britney and Dennis the Menace for Publicity Rodman, perhaps people under the age of 30 only know Nureyev, if they know him at all, from fleeting references here and there along the celebrity bio trail (he pops up in the Beautiful People gossip tome Andy Warhol's Diaries, for instance) or as the man who drives a besmitten Miss Piggy to perform "Swine Lake" on an old episode of The Muppets Show.
The exhibit, part of the JakArt@2001 celebration of the arts, is a small but intimate look into his life and career for both fans and the uninitiated. There are pictures of a very young Nureyev after his defection in Paris during a tour of the Kirov ballet, with Queen Elizabeth after a performance, another showing him with her sometimes wayward sister Margaret (Nureyev is wearing thigh-high Robin Hood boots) and a visit to the Oval Office to meet Jimmy and Roslynn Carter.
There are programs for his performances and images of him with his dancing partners such as Natalia Makarova and, of course, Margot Fonteyn, with whom he made such a beautiful union that many ballet-goers believed the older English woman and the young man from the Urals must be sexually involved.
The pictures are fascinating in their own right but, in this Nureyev's case, they do not tell the whole story (and the omission of labels from some of the photographs is frustrating). It's the inclusion of some of his costumes, his ballet slippers and the recreation of his bedroom from his Paris apartment, faithfully put together by his manager and friends, which bring this great star down to earth.
Particularly interesting is the costume from Le Sacre de Printemps (The Rite of Spring), the Stravinsky ballet which caused a scandal when first performed in 1913 by Nijinsky, the ballet dancer who many compared Nureyev to. In the bedroom recreated for the exhibition, a gaudy T-shirt is draped over a chair and a terry-cloth bathrobe is on the bed, simple reminders of Nureyev's life lived outside the public eye.
"He had many friends, but he was often alone, lonely," another person remarks in the video. It's an ironic and somewhat poignant, even sad, reflection on a man who gave up his country and his family for the "freedom" of the West.
But even eight years after his death, the charisma of Nureyev still draws a response a world away from where he lived and died. A young Asian woman sat cross-legged watching the video on a Sunday morning, dabbing her eyes as the story of the final years of Nureyev unfolded on the video.
Her reaction told of the enduring power of this unique man, and also of the importance of events like JakArt to a city so often starved of cultural diversity. Only a few meters away, a western couple and their child went downstairs to the Chirico and Lisa Solitis exhibitions after viewing the exquisite silver jewelry by Swedish-born Torun. Nearby an elderly Indonesian couple took in Santap Malam Bersama Sri, an installation about the rice-growing culture of West Java.
Away from all the criticism of JakArt's disorganized promotion and murmured tales of bruised egos, it's moments like these that make it an event to celebrate.
The Nureyev exhibition is at the National Museum, Jl. Medan Merdeka Barat 12, Central Jakarta, until Saturday.