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In 1983, the year he took over as director of the Paris Ballet Opera, Nureyev attended the showing of the Baroque ballet “Rameau l’enchanteur” performed in Versailles by the French Ris et Danceries Ballet Company, and featuring the outstanding, leading dancer Wilfride Piollet. This show was an eye-opener for Rudolf Nureyev, long interested in old dances since his time spent in Leningrad. Captivated by the work of choreographer, Francine Lancelot, and perhaps influenced by the prestige of the three-hundred year old institution for which he had just become responsible (founded by Louis XIV in 1669, as the emblem above the Palais Garnier stage curtain reminded him) the dancer wanted to test his measure against an old genre which was as new to him as it was to most of the French people. It was Francine Lancelot who rediscovered and revived the “Belle Danse”, but Nureyev was no stranger to its official recognition as it was he who included it in the Opera’s repertoire.
After having seen “Rameau l’enchanteur”, he asked Francine Lancelot to devise him a solo using Bach’s Suite No.3 in C major for cello; Bach, whose “Inventions” he played regularly on harpsichord or on piano, was his favourite musician. This was no mean task for the choreographer, specialist as she was in French ballet with Bach being German!
“No Baroque ballets were devised for this music. It was Rameau that counted, Bach was unknown in France” Francine Lancelot told Marcelle Michel from “Le Monde” at the time. “Consequently, I had to construct the steps and enchainements using existing vocabulary”.
“I am astounded by the way in which, working by imitation and without notation, Nureyev assimilates such complicated enchainements. He acquired the natural arm movements and gesture sense instinctively. If I show him that the ornamentation is correct before the note, he understands and reacts instantly. After only a few rehearsals, he has practically abandoned force in favour of gracefulness. Generally speaking, he puts enormous energy into things instead of trusting in his sensibility; but he is an overly gifted dancer whereas I am but the architect” (article quoted in “Rudolf Nureyev in Paris”, the programme book designed by the staff of the Paris Opera and edited by La Martinière on the occasion of the gala held on the 20th January 2003 in the Palais Garnier to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the death of Rudolf Nureyev).
Francine Lancelot drew her inspiration for the choreography in “Bach Suite” from the reference manual: “Dancing Master” published in 1725 by Pierre Rameau, Ballet master and theorist (1674-1748) not to be confused with Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) famous composer of the “Indes Galantes”. In his thesis which, incidentally, was written at the same time as Bach’s Suites, Pierre Rameau explains in detail how to execute the steps of forty or so dances performed during the age of Louis XIV at court balls and Opera ballets. Photographs of rehearsals for “Bach-Suite” printed in the programme for the 1983 creation leave no room for doubt about this, the engravings of Pierre Rameau’s work being set side by side with attitudes of Nureyev at work.
“The Baroque style, continued the choreographer, unites a Cartesian logic (construction of space and harmony of the dancer’s body) with an extremely refined and unobtrusive sensuality providing a transposition of passions, more real than nature itself. In his thesis “Dancing Master” Pierre Rameau reiterates “the importance of knowing how to position the body in a graceful pose…”. It is quite a complex art: although the dance did not require enormous muscular strength and did not demand performance, it did require a certain concentrated effort to co-ordinate arm and feet movement”. A work of memorization so difficult that, according to Francine Lancelot, Nureyev, sick with nerves, trembled like a leaf during the first rehearsals.
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