Nureyev: Legend and Legacy review – firecracker spins and star turns

Introducing this gala in honour of Rudolf Nureyev – a ardour mission directed by former Royal Ballet principal Nehemiah Kish – actor and director Ralph Fiennes invoked Nureyev the legend: the dancer whose world fame prolonged means past the generally airtight world of dance, his dramatic defection from Soviet Russia in 1961 sweeping him up within the wider currents of the age, with its chilly warfare divisions and incipient actions of non-public liberation. Former Royal Ballet director Monica Mason spoke of his legacy throughout the dance world, and in reality the gala itself is in regards to the dancing fairly than the dancer, gathering a world roster of top-notch dancers briefly extracts with backstory connections to Nureyev’s profession.

It started considerably shakily, Guillaume Côté hesitant in Nureyev’s interpolated solo in The Sleeping Magnificence which, shorn of dramatic context, in any case feels minimize adrift. Two individuals on stage are already a drama, and Oleg Ivenko (star of The White Crow, Fiennes’ movie about Nureyev) and Maia Makhateli fared higher within the lilting leans and swaggers of a scene from Gayane – although Xander Parish and Iana Salenko regarded oddly mismatched within the following Bayadère duet, she an icy apparition who appears to go away him not simply chilly, however nonplussed.

Maia Makhateli and Oleg Ivenko in Gayane.
Lilting leans … Maia Makhateli and Oleg Ivenko in Gayane. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The night actually took off with Francesco Gabriele Frola and Ida Praetorius in Bournonville’s Flower Pageant in Genzano, Frola particularly breezing and skimming in Bournonville’s fleet-footed fashion. The pas de six from the Soviet-era Laurencia introduced on the massive weapons earlier than the interval, Natalia Osipova and Cesar Corrales powering by way of outsize jumps and firecracker spins.

If the second half additionally opened much less absolutely with one other Sleeping Magnificence scene (Vadim Muntagirov and Natascha Mair), the remainder of the night was all up. Francesca Hayward and William Bracewell have been each haunted and haunting in a scene from Giselle – a becoming prelude to a spellbinding second from John Neumeier’s Don Juan: Alexandr Trusch a mystified mortal, Alina Cojocaru a spectral presence morphing between pliant supplicant and stiffened corpse or cross. The finale: Cesar Corrales and Yasmine Naghdi within the flashy Corsaire pas de deux, certainly one of Nureyev’s first successes. The small stage, with the Royal Ballet Sinfonia packed into the again, felt able to pop with all of the fizz.

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