In Dancer, Colum McCann gives us a passionate, gorgeous (fictionalized) account of the life of dancer and choreographer Rudolf Nureyev.
Often, when we hear statements like, "his life is inseparable from the tumultuous events of the twentieth century," we cringe--what a cliché! But in the case of Nureyev it is undoubtedly true. Furthermore, McCann blows the cliché out of the water by actually showing us what this means. For example, he plots Nureyev's childhood against the backdrop of what Soviets called "The Great Patriotic War"--the part of World War II in which they fought off the German invasion. McCann's depiction of frostbitten, maimed Soviet soldiers eating their starved horses in the trenches, the women who cleaned them up afterwards, and little Rudik Nureyev and his schoolmates performing folk dances to entertain the wounded men in the hospital is no less virtuosic than Nureyev and the great Margot Fonteyn as Romeo and Juliet.
Nureyev was born in 1938 in Soviet Russia; in 1961 he defected to the West. McCann masterfully creates the colors and contradictions of both worlds. The Soviet Union is a repressive regime whose luckiest citizens are those old enough to cherish memories from before the Iron Curtain dropped. The West has its own brand of coldness. McCann reveals the sorrow of the émigré who--a product of both, yet belonging to neither--may never go home again.
Through this bleak milieu leaps Rudik Nureyev, a gay (bisexual?) ballet dancer of Muslim Tatar heritage, passionately devoted to his true self and his art in defiance of his army veteran father and eventually in defiance of his government. We come to know him through others: his mother, his first ballet teacher, his sister, his assistants and lovers and friends--even the cobbler who manufactures his custom ballet shoes. We also know Rudik through pages of hastily scribbled notes to himself--on how to perfect his grand jetés, to remember social appointments, on books he'd like to read or had read, on his travels--his energy and love of life transported as if by electrical impulse from his mind to the page.
To me, McCann's refusal to tie up or reconcile the many facets of Nureyev's life and personality speaks not only to how various, how expansive, and how deep this artist was, but also to how many strands of his being there were to manage, how many relationships to nurture, how many choices to make. What was the limit of the sacrifice he offered to Dance?
Or maybe McCann means to say that there can be no definitive version of Nureyev's life, other than the one that he himself lived.
That life ended in 1993, when Nureyev succumbed to HIV/AIDS. But, as portrayed by Colum McCann, the Dancer never succumbed to the vast impersonal forces of twentieth-century wars, totalitarianism, capitalism, or even homophobia. He soared above.
