Patricia Ruanne Part 2: Rudolf Nureyev and the Passion for Work

2/5

BB: How did you come to restage Nureyev’s dances?

Ms. Ruanne: Rudolf created Sleeping Beauty before he made Romeo. It is probably fair to say that the majority of my performances in the years with Rudolf were in Beauty, and it was the ballet that made me go and teach. The Beauty production was the beginning of learning how to restage his works. I always worked with Rudolf, and there was never anybody involved in the teaching process except Rudolf. So, in a sense, I feel that from every point of view of that production, I have all the elements that Rudolf wished to put across, from the corps de ballet to the lighting to the principal roles.

Romeo is the same case. I created Juliet, so I have always looked after the principals. Ric created Tybalt, and also danced Paris so he’s always had those roles covered. There was this terribly scary moment the first time that we had to put together a production after Rudolf died. I had such a wealth of information and could draw on the things that he had said but it was a difficult threshold to cross, to restage a work without his participation.

You know, Rudolf made such a study before he did Romeo. I think he was anxious to create a ballet that could speak about being young today, which is not a question of reworking a classic in the manner of Swan Lake. Romeo was his own conception from the beginning to the end with a lot of influence from Zefferelli’s film. He also tried to be so faithful to the written word that sometimes it confused the issue because it’s kind of hard to put Mecutio’s Queen Mab speech into dance, but he tried. Sometimes this attempt to be faithful to the play diffuses the drama because unless you read the play, you have no idea what’s going on or what the movement represents. So, in a sense, for anything you want you just go back to the play. That is where you you’ll find the reference, and if at any time there is confusion, it’s in there. If you have knowledge of the play, then it’s all very simple. And that’s difficult.

So you have to do a little talking to dancers today, a lot of talking actually, because they don’t read the play. I am doing [Kenneth MacMillan’s] Manon at the moment [at the Paris Opera]. None of the dancers have read the original classic work that Manon is based on, so I feel that’s part of the job of anyone who is responsible for the production to fill them in. They don’t have time to read or interest in reading, so they’d rather watch a film version. Yet, you must oblige the choreographer to understand the period in which your character is dancing. What happened then? What was it like? How did the dramatic situation evolve?

The difficulty these days is finding enough time. It’s not that dancers aren’t interested in knowing more. When you sit down and start to talk with them you see very quickly the difference in how dancers approach productions today. And this superficial approach is more and more evident in recent years. Ashton, MacMillan, and Cranko did narrative ballets as opposed to dance for dancing’s sake. In their dances, the choreography is the movement script. The choreography serves the telling of the story or creates a mood, temperament, or personality. But today, dancers tend to learn the steps for their own sake and then they try to superimpose whatever character they are meant to be and it should be quite the opposite effort. The steps should reflect the personality yet it’s hard to persuade dancers to work in that dramatic way with the material—from the inside out. But if you believe in the work and you are constructing the role, the steps become perfectly logical. Otherwise the steps are an immense chaos.

If a choreographer is working with you on the creation of a ballet—one that is going to be a narrative piece where you portray a character—one of the first things he will want to see is the person that you believe you can create because that’s going to channel the way he choreographs. So if the choreographer wants Juliet, you have to provide him with a form of Juliet, how you perceive her to be, so that he can immediately say, “That’s not how I perceive Juliet.”

It was difficult for me when we first did Romeo, because if Rudolf had had his way, Juliet would have been a boy. Rudolf had first read the play in Russian, and it’s quite a study to understand the fine points of Shakespeare when it’s not even your given language. Inevitably, he was intrigued by the fact that in Shakespeare’s time there were no female actors and that Juliet would have been played by a boy. I am sure that I would have not gotten the part if I had not been as strong as a horse. In working on this ballet with Rudolf, I realized that I had to change my point of view and realize that Juliet was the strength in the play. She is the one who makes the decisions, the one who is determined that this will work. She plots and plans, and Rudolf was very nervous about the masculine element and the animal reaction of two teenagers who don’t know quite how to play this game of love. But events happen, and they have to react and respond to them.

Rudolf asked, “What would happen in a family row when everybody talks at once and nobody understands what’s happening?” The death of Juliet was never choreographed. It was . . . we talked about it, you see, and this was an enormously interesting and exciting way of working. We figured we’d take a few risks, but at the same time, because it’s a work of creation this method inevitably becomes settled as you do it more and more. But what Rudolf was doing was pulling the characters out of the people he was working with—who we were and who we could become as personalities. The ballet was made very closely on the specific people that he chose to work with. In this regard it was a true creation.

Rudolf choreographed all the parts on others in order to be able to see them—he didn’t choreograph on his own body. It was a whole different way of working. He used a personality, responding to Mercutio, Tybalt, and Benvolio as they were. It was an amazingly interesting experience. That is also how Kenneth and Ashton worked—they pulled an enormous amount out of their dancers. They allowed themselves to be moved by them and “spied” on the people that they were working with. Every great artist creates from his muse: Fonteyn with Ashton, Seymour with MacMillan. Maybe one of the problems today is that dancers don’t get enough opportunity to have ballets created on them except in places where the choreographer is also the artistic director.