Nureyev and Gender

I still can’t really read, but here are some Nureyev images, since he’s been on my mind. I am halfway through the Nureyev book, and hopefully I’ll get to finish it some day.

I love the androgyny of Nureyev in the pictures below (especially the one of him and Fonteyn, with him upside down – in the classic swan dive usually associated with females, her head close to his crotch level). It’s gorgeous, erotic, but also unsettling to regularized gender roles, up-ending convention, which is one of the main things Nureyev appears to have contributed to ballet. As a youth, in Russia, the style was that the male was basically the “heavy” – he was meant to be statuesque, strong, and classical, and be able to lift the female about. Macho. Unemotional. This sort of static dancing, although highly technical, requiring great skill, bored Nureyev, and he got some intimation of the winds of change going on in the West, through seeing grainy tapes of this or that ballet dancer in the West, and he realized (perhaps without articulating it to himself) that things were changing “out there”, outside of Russia, and he needed to be a part of it. Rigid preconceived notions of gender dissolving. Nureyev stopped modeling himself on the male dancers he saw around him, and began focusing on the ballerinas, imitating THEM, bringing their long flowing grace into the male parts … and at the time it was hugely controversial.

Good for him.

He’s so beautiful, and so strong, but there is also a softness about him that lets you, the viewer, in. It was a revelation at the time. It occurs to me that this is similar to the great conversation Catherine, Desirae and I had that most superstars have a certain amount of androgyny. The hard mixed with the soft, female and male … We were talking there about rock stars, but you can see it in actors too, especially the old-school actors with their set recognizable personae. Joan Crawford – all woman, all curves and legs, but with a backbone of steel and a hardness to her. Gary Cooper – all man, all lanky legs and straight-edges, but with the ability to show us behind the mask, all the softness and hopes and fears, in a way that would be “typically female”. The obvious examples of Marlene Dietrich, who consciously toyed with gender in every role she played. Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck … each had some aspect of androgyny to them, either conscious or no, which (to me) just makes them even more universal.

Nureyev made this androgyny his stock-in-trade. Well, that, and being the best dancer he could be. I think a lot of his persona was not so much calculated and consciously created, but just the result of a killer instinct.