Nureyev the star comes down to earth

Nureyev the 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
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.