I ask myself if American boys will feel more like taking up dancing after Rudolf Nureyev has passed among them, or less. Every great male dancer has in his time cut an evangelical swath, and by giving notice that one can be elegant and male, too, has eased if not precisely delighted many a father’s faint heart. For Americans today Jacques d’Amboise’s casual grandeur, Edward Villella’s mercurial zest, are palpably reassuring; as reassuring as was the great dancing of the two American-adopted stars, Eglevsky and Youske-vitch, before them. But part of Nureyev’s fascination—his manner seems at every moment to imply it—is his refusal to reassure anyone about any-thing. His haughty isolation, the romantic ambiguity of his presence, are more intense on this, his second tour of Hurok’s America, than on his first. His stage manners (he may turn his back on an applauding audience) and his curtain calls are more amusingly perverse than ever.
And this is no “Russian” exoticism but a calculated personal style he seems to find congenial. Audiences do, too—when they are not collapsing in delighted giggles over what clearly must seem, at times, a put-on as big as the Ritz. Nureyev’s way with fourteen feet of streaming cloak, his heavy languor in static poses, and his awful sick room make-up (disheveled mane, blackened eyepits in an ashen
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