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It was beautiful to watch the woman who was one of his earliest friends in Leningrad, whose academic career was ruined after the defection, as she described her memories. And the same holds for the Romanian roomate at the ballet academy. It says something very important about Nureyev that he was able to attract and hold friends like these.

I specially loved Nureyev's Romanian roommate stories. Somwhere , and refering to Rudy's body, he said something like "People like a good body physique, and if this body is dancing, then is a masterpiece". I think it was a beautiful idea.

A couple of things I didn't like:

The discussion of his relationship with Menia Martinez is illustrated with Lucette Aldous, from a much later performance of Don Quijote (the Australian Balle video?) that could only confuse people who don't know the story well.

I totally agree. That was annoying...

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My mother forgot to tape it!!!! I reminded her (being without a TV in the dorms is an odd experience) about 50 times and sent an email, and she called me this morning and told me that she forgot. I was wondering if the DVD was worth buying or if the book were worth buying as well.

Would you watch it again if you had the chance? How was the archival footage of Rudi?

I am sure that PBS with air it again. They usually will repeat a program like that.

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Can you imagine BTW having a name that is "lenin" spelled backward?

:clapping: Many Russians of a certain generation have kooky Soviet neologisms for names. I wouldn't care to speculate how many women of Kurgaplina's generation were named Ninel', but I don't think that the name would have seemed at all odd at the time.

BTW, the male equivalent is Vladlen, a contraction of Vladimir Lenin. Off the top of my head I can't think of any dancers with that name, but I can think of actors and opera singers with that handle.

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"Ninel" is actually quite a lovely name. (As is Lenin's real family name, if you spell it backwards: "Vonaylu.") Many Soviets -- like Nureyev's father and mother -- were sincere and even fervent Party supporters, and some may have wished to avoid traditional (that is, Christian) first names, as one sees today in Castro's Cuba.

Solway mentions that Rudolf's father's family name was originally Fasliyev.

However, surmnames were never firmly fixed in Russian villages until the first decades of this century and boys were often known by their patronymics. Thus, in Asnovo, Rudolf's father was known as Nuriakhmetovich, or Nuri's son. (Nuri is a Tatar world meaning "beam of light.") It was a common Tatar practice for boys to take their father's given names as their surnames, which is how Hamet Fasilyev became Hamet Fasliyeich Nuriyev when he left his village for the city of Kazan in the 1920s. Hamet was the only member of his family to chanage his surname; today, his relatives still carry the Fasliyev name.

It's been mentioned earlier that Nureyev's religious background was Muslim. Although his father and mother both grew up in observant Moslem families, they reacted against it when they became converts to the Revolution. The family Rudolph grew up in conformed to official atheism and was in no sense religious. At least, this is what I have read.

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One of the things that the young Nureyev had was that incredible turning speed. It was one of those things that I stopped seeing in him in '75. Seeing some early footage of the Desiré variation with him landing the end in an ouvert kneeling position was illuminating. He later famously ended in a straight-up fifth out of a brace of incredibly fast chainés.

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"Ninel" is actually quite a lovely name... Many Soviets -- like Nureyev's father and mother -- were sincere and even fervent Party supporters, and some may have wished to avoid traditional (that is, Christian) first names, as one sees today in Castro's Cuba.

When I visited the USSR in its death throes I met a middle-aged woman named Ninel who detested her name. She took it to be a manifestation of deplorable weakness on the part of her parents. In everyday life she went by Nina instead.

BTW, the male equivalent is Vladlen, a contraction of Vladimir Lenin. Off the top of my head I can't think of any dancers with that name, but I can think of actors and opera singers with that handle.

Like Vladilen Semenov?

Excellent example. Thanks.

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some may have wished to avoid traditional (that is, Christian) first names, as one sees today in Castro's Cuba.

You're absolutely right, bart. When i was going to be registered, my original name was supposed to be Christian, but the authorities didn't allowed my mother to do so,because of the religious connotations of this name in its english translation so the only way to kept it was by eliminating the H, and becoming Cristian, wich in that form was no more the english translation of a Christ follower, (big trouble back then and there, by the way...

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Mother should have told them, that you were being named for Fletcher Christian, who led The Revolution aboard HMS Bounty!

I think Thesmar had it right. He didn't seem to have a standard religion, but a sort of personal mysticism and philosophy that produced a Rule of Life. Defining what THAT was would take a whole book by itself!

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One of the things that the young Nureyev had was that incredible turning speed. It was one of those things that I stopped seeing in him in '75.
This impossibly fast chaines are something that non-ballet-oriented people often mention about the earlier videos. Thanks for reminding me.
Mother should have told them, that you were being named for Fletcher Christian, who led The Revolution aboard HMS Bounty!
:clapping: What a great idea!

Or, reversing it (with one variation) might have worked. Naitsirch sounds positively Soviet.

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This impossibly fast chaines are something that non-ballet-oriented people often mention about the earlier videos.

Aren't they just amazing...? :angry2: I find this super speeding force , either on the chainees or the pique turns on these old soviet videos, something like hypnotic. ( like Dudinskaya's on her 1957 Black Swan ). By the way, Nureyev's whole Corsaire PDD is in the DVD "The Glory of Kirov".

Mother should have told them, that you were being named for Fletcher Christian, who led The Revolution aboard HMS Bounty!

Ooh..poor mother was just scared that i wouldn't be able to keep my name :tomato:

:lol: What a great idea! Or, reversing it (with one variation) might have worked. Naitsirch sounds positively Soviet.

God, thank God that didn't happen, because you know what?...That kind of thing was a popular practice back then. I had a friend, a girl, ( :wink: ) whose name, Ernesallen, was the mix of Ernesto Guevara and Salvador Allende, two popular communist heroes in the cuban political iconography. :blink:

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Overall I thought this was a fine show. It was obvious that much time, money, and care went into its making. I hope everyone who sees it and liked it will drop a note to PBS praising this program and asking for more. Most exciting for me: the Bluebird footage; the folk variation from Gayaneh; the dance on the grass. I also loved the early footage of F&N in "Giselle," which I hadn't seen before.

Peeve: More attention should have been paid to the niceties of pronunciation. They couldn’t even settle on the right way to say “Nureyev," for heaven's sake.

I didn’t really appreciate Stefanschi’s referring to Dudinskaya as an “old lady.”

A telling little detail for me was Kurgapkina’s story about company members waiting up nights in the hotel while on tour to monitor the comings and goings of their colleagues in order to be able to tattle voluntarily as a display of loyalty. Just one small way in which a closed society turns its members against each other.

I wonder how much chaos his defection did cause in his friends lives, or if it was just another trouble that everyone had then.

From what I’ve read, his defection was a disaster not only for his friends but for the company as a whole.

And the splicing back and forth on some of the dance clips was horrid.

I agree.

A title flashed very quickly and I think it said 1979, which would make Fonteyn 60. I didn't understand at all why they used that footage. Even Nureyev was past his best at this point although he still looked very good.

It did say 1979, and I wondered about that. I think that particular excerpt and most if not all of the excerpts of later performances -- were deployed, often melodramatically and not always effectively, to point up the biographical incidents being described.

I wouldn’t have chosen that segment, but in principle it’s not the function of a documentary to make them look good at all costs.....

One of the things that the young Nureyev had was that incredible turning speed.

I couldn’t believe how fast he was in those clips. It looked like trick photography.

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The PR touted all the new amazing unseen-before-now footage, and there was some...The 'home movies' by Teja, the early school performances, Bluebird etc., but most of the more 'contemporary' footage of Nureyev after his defection was from (egregiously uncredited) newsclips or documentaries which I've already seen. And I too was shocked by the usage of 1979 footage of M&A, and agree with the comments re Fonteyn and misuse of his other partners.

So many times I have searched for footage of N's early dancing to erase my memories from late 70's of sadly sliding technique. Much of this documentary's footage demonstrated the amazing power, energy, (yes, speed), and forceful emotionalism of his dancing, but I still missed a reliable technical brilliance. As posted above, I too noticed the faults of form, and wondered how much his incredible drive and determination to overcome it, had really succeeded. I will always admire that courage and drive, and willingness to pour his whole being into dancing, but still feel a certain wistful longing for opportunities missed.

I am glad they did the documentary, and the re-enactment/explications of the defection helped me understand much of the fear and frustration of those caught up in such regimes, but I do hate compilation documentaries where footage from other sources (which may or may not be relevant to the point at hand) is slashed together to fill what we cannot find for ourselves.

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Overall I thought this was a fine show. It was obvious that much time, money, and care went into its making. I hope everyone who sees it and liked it will drop a note to PBS praising this program and asking for more. Most exciting for me: the Bluebird footage; the folk variation from Gayaneh; the dance on the grass. I also loved the early footage of F&N in "Giselle," which I hadn't seen before.

Dance on the grass: Amour's variation from Don Q? What a delight!

I wonder how much chaos his defection did cause in his friends lives, or if it was just another trouble that everyone had then.

From what I've read, his defection was a disaster not only for his friends but for the company as a whole.

And didn't his defection pave the way for those of Makarova, Baryshnikov and Bolshoi dancers Godunov, Kozlova and Kozlov? So it went beyond the loss of its greatest star in 1961, into the next demigeneration down.

And the splicing back and forth on some of the dance clips was horrid.

I agree.

Much of the musical synching was off, and some was completely irrelevant.

One of the things that the young Nureyev had was that incredible turning speed.

I couldn't believe how fast he was in those clips. It looked like trick photography.

I don't know if it was intentionally so, but yes, the playback speed seemed faster than the recorded speed.

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I hope everyone who sees it and liked it will drop a note to PBS praising this program and asking for more.
Yes! Let's all do it -- and to the local station for showing it.

Also, when we make a contribution to our local station, we have to make sure to underline that we are part of a large but often silent group of viewers wanting more classical arts in general, and ballet in particular. :angry2:

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. Among the clips I saw, the Bayadere snippet was the thing that brought a gasp and tear to my eye. I always wished that I could have seen a film

of RN at least doing the Shade scene. It was my one regret as my ballet watching/loving progressed.

IMO I always imagined Rudolf as a magnificant Solor. So the brief view, showed me what I imagined for years was true! Bravo RN forever.

Mel or anyone. If anyone saw him as Solor in the 60's, could you decribe the experience?

As someone who loves ballet, due to Rudi, this film just gave me a wonderful gift

And there were many who had never heard of any ballet dancer before Nureyev. We owe him so much.

I, too, would like to hear from anyone who saw his Solor.

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