He defected at the age of 23
He died of AIDS at the age of 55
The life of the legendary ballet master was made into a movie—
The White Crow
The White Crow
The film is based on the biographical novel Rudolf Nuriyev: A Lifetime
It's an unfamiliar name to us.
And his life story is difficult not to pay attention to.
Rudolf Nuriyev, a former Soviet ballet master. He is renowned for his high artistic attainments and promotion of ballet.
Rudolf Nuriyev Buddha-figure
Nuriyev broke through the actress's toes monopoly, and his dangling jumps and rapid rotations re-appreciated the masculine charm of classical ballet.
At the same time, his life was extremely ups and downs, full of legends and tragedies.
The movie "White Crow" attempts to use images to recall the moment when the ballet master shocked the world - the defection experience in a tortuous life.
In the view of screenwriter David Hale, starting from the dramatic tension, the film ends with Nuriyev's defection at the Paris airport, which is the most dramatic moment of his life.
David Hale, one of the best contemporary British playwrights, loves three-line narrative structures, and the film features Nuriyev's poor childhood in Ufa, his youth studying ballet in St. Petersburg, and his first tour of Paris with a troupe.
Talented and charismatic famous British actor Ralph Fiennes, acting and directing, he also served as the director and producer of the film. In the film, he also played Nuriyev's mentor, Alexander Pushkin.
Nuriyev was played by Ukrainian ballet dancer Oleg Ivinko.
Born in 1996, the dancer has eyebrows similar to Nuriyev's, which is really similar, and also has the ability to master the difficult dance moves in the film. Oleg's superb dancing skills restore the charm of Nuriyev.
In 1938, Nuriyev was born on a speeding train, and his life seemed to be doomed to drifting.
Born into poverty, he became obsessed with ballet at the age of 5, so he wanted to learn ballet regardless of his disregard. In 1953, Nuriyev finally entered the Leningrad Ballet School in his heart and studied with the famous ballet master Alexander Pushkin.
On the ballet stage, women have always been the backbone, and men can only show some simple movements, becoming a foil for female dancers.
To change this, Nuriyev rearranged some classic dances, incorporating modern dance elements into ballet, adding more movements to male dancers and balancing the expressiveness of both sexes.
Almost single-handedly, he reversed the long-standing supporting role of male dancers in ballet. Improvements to the ballet landscape made him a quick hit in the late 1950s and soon became a household name in the Soviet Union.
At the age of 20, he won the gold medal at the Moscow International Ballet Competition and became a soloist at the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad.
Critics at the time described him this way:
"His incredibly difficult churning makes one wonder if he has a pair of hidden wings, the others are dancing on the ground, he is dancing in the air, kirov's stage is beginning to make people wonder about the gravity of the earth." 」
In 1961, Nuriyev toured Europe for the first time with the Kirov Troupe. In Paris, he performed a two-week spin and a curled leg jump that no one else could complete at that time, and the audience was amazed, and he became a brilliant star that everyone looked up to.
Extraordinary dance skills, strength and enterprising spirit have since begun his career as an international ballet master, and the beauty of art and personality have been integrated in Nuriyev.
However, while in Paris, he received a warning from Agent Kögler (Kögler, Soviet intelligence agency) for not following discipline, wandering around the streets of Paris, walking through the streets of Paris, playing with his peers in the parisian art world.
While the troupe was heading to London to continue its performance, he was abruptly stopped before boarding the plane, and Agent Kögler announced that Nuriyev would perform a festival performance for Khrushchev, then supreme leader of the Soviet Union, and that he would have to be flown back to Moscow in two hours to send him back to China.
He knew that this trip was more fierce and less auspicious, and returning home was a dead end. In Nuriyev's autobiographical novel, it is described as follows:
"This means that I may never be able to return to the stage, and then my life will lose its meaning."
Living today, it is difficult for us to imagine the political environment at that time.
According to information, moscow had already made a decision at that time: nuriyev, who had obvious treason tendencies, would be sent back to China and exiled to Siberia.
According to the scholar Peter Walterson's study of the Klele archives, Khrushchev also personally signed an order for Nuriyev's assassination.
How can I stay and survive?
There is a woman who plays a key role.
She was clara Sante, the future daughter-in-law of then-French Minister of Culture André Malraux.
In the film, the actress who played this role was Adele Eksalhoblos, who had previously starred in the film "Adele's Life".
Nuriyev, with Clara's help, sought political asylum from the French police and remained in France.
At that time, the news of his defection made headlines in the Western media and caused a sensation around the world.
Abandoning the oppressive and dictatorial Soviet Union and defecting to a free and open Western world. This is the political interpretation of the figure of Nuriyev by many people.
This defection, in the eyes of the Soviet Union, was treason, an attack on the national level, a traitor to the state, to be eliminated.
In the eyes of the West, this was another "victory for the capitalist camp" and gave this "defection" a name – a journey to freedom in Paris.
This was the news that caused a sensation in the Western world that year and caused great repercussions. At the height of the Cold War, the Western world saw Nuriyev's "surrender" as a great opportunity for anti-communist propaganda.
In politics, Nuriyev's defection is a pawn and a tool in the hands of politicians.
After his defection, however, Nuriyev never publicly criticized the Soviet Union and repeatedly stressed that his defection had nothing to do with politics.
For him, it's all about art, for dance, for the stage. Art is his life.
As Nuriyev's teacher Alexander said:
It's not about politics, it's about dance.
Defection undoubtedly prolonged his artistic life.
At first, he was not in good shape in France. At that time, France-Soviet relations were good, and France did not want the relations between the two countries to deteriorate as a result of this incident, so it did not grant Nuriyev residency and did not allow him to perform at the National Theatre in Paris. During this time, he also faced constant threats and intimidation from Kögler.
During Nuriyev's life, two women had a profound influence on him and helped him greatly, one was Clara Sant, who helped him stay in France, and the other was Margot Fontaine, the principal ballet master of the Royal Ballet, who saved him from the water.
In 1962, Nuriyev was invited by Margot Fontaine to london to perform with her.
At the time, 41-year-old Fang Ting and 24-year-old Nuriyev collaborated on the ballet stage, which began a 17-year-long "century of cooperation". They became the greatest pairs in the history of world ballet, leaving behind the legendary Giselle, Swan Lake, and La Traviata.
In 1965, he and Fontaine performed "Swan Lake" in Vienna, a total of 89 curtain calls, setting a record for the closing of the curtain in the history of dance.
Nuriyev called Fontaine the only woman in his life.
In 1987, Nuriyev performed stills from the ballet Don Quixote
In addition to being a famous ballet master, he is also a famous choreographer and producer, resuming the rearrangement of famous Russian dramas such as "Sleeping Beauty", "Maihime", "Swan Lake", "Nutcracker" and so on. Today, many opera houses in the world still use Nuriyev's plays for ballets.
Defection is also caused by nature, and freedom has entered his life.
He was a child born on a train. A lifetime of fascination with trains, a lifetime of fascination with freedom.
"Nuriyev was born on a train, and he spent his life at a speed of 100 miles per hour."
He is like 1900 in "The Pianist at Sea", freedom is immersed in his life.
Whether it's Andy in The Shawshank Redemption, or Wolfgang in Penitentiary... Those free birds cannot be shut down.
"I can live anywhere." Remember, I was born on the train."
For the persistent pursuit of art and the yearning for freedom, he chose to stay in the West and betrayed his country, but he found what he wanted to pursue, and it was also the meaning that his hometown could not give him.
In Russia, the nickname White Crow is mostly used to describe unusual, maverick people.
Nuriyev, that's the kind of person. This is true in both character and behavior.
On the stage, it is precisely because of this personality that he is driven to constantly hone his dance skills, improve the ballet pattern, rearrange and improve famous plays, and complete artistic breakthroughs again and again.
In life, his personality is solipsistic, unrestrained, and uninhibited, and he is also grumpy. An actress who has worked with him once said: "It's an honor to work with Nuriyev, but I'm also very scared because he has such a bad temper, I'm really afraid that he will throw me off the stage when he picks me up and circles during the show." ”
In the film, Clara, who is so angry that he leaves the table, meets him again at a dinner party, where Clara tells him, "I forgive you for being the most selfish man I've ever met." ”
His willfulness makes people mad, his irritability makes people fearful, and at the same time, it may also represent his undisguised true feelings.
There is such a short comment on Douban:
"In a way, extreme selfishness is the ultimate freedom."
In a way, it's quite true.
His seemingly maverick outlier image in Paris arouses the suspicion of Kleggler, all for the sake of dancing and capturing inspiration. All art is integrated. Maverick because he truly loves and throws himself into it.
Travel the streets of Paris and see the various architecture. Often get up early to visit the Louvre, stop to admire the great paintings and sculptures. He believes that these works of art will inspire his dance.
At the peak of his success, Nuriyev said proudly:
"I hope that people will watch me perform as excitedly as if they were standing in front of a painting by a master painter, and I hope that people will either love me or hate me, but not be indifferent to me." 」
He believes that he is dancing with his whole soul, and he makes ballet even more noble. Nuriyev once joked that dedicating himself to art was "making his body a slave to this art", and his feet were indeed tortured to the point of utter misery.
Nuriyev's story does not stop there, and there are people who cherish each other, but their stories are still veiled with sadness.
Such a life story, a movie, is actually far from finished.
His life, accompanied by legend and tragedy, became a variation of the times.
Perception is more important than empathy.
- END -
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