Final Looks at the IED and Nureyev.

This month we publish the third view of the new International Encyclopedia of Dance by a dance journalist and critic. Glenn Giffin's review appeared in January (page 73) and Octavio Roca's review in February (page 66).

Many, many years ago there was a cartoon by Peter Arno in the New Yorker showing a civilian, stern but resolute, briefcase in hand, a roll of plans neatly tucked under his arm, walking away from a plane crash that itself was surrounded by gesticulating and aghast military men. The cartoon, if memory serves, was captioned: "Oh, well, back to the drawing board!"

This is the third and, I'm glad to say, last review we will have published on the International Encyclopedia of Dance, for the condition of dead horses is rarely improved by their flogging. And, I fear, the horse is dead ... the plane has crashed. Even most of the disappointment has by now been absorbed. Back to the drawing board.

If I seem too dismissive--and I do admit that the very appearance of such a large undertaking is in itself little less than a triumph of determination--it is simply that the very same fact of that appearance will doubtless discourage further attempts at a truly acceptable reference work on dance for years to come. And the present volumes, while far from useless, are also far from reasonably comprehensive or totally reliable.

What I think most of us hoped for in this grand undertaking--sponsored by the Dance Perspectives Foundation and published by Oxford University Press in six volumes with 4,000 pages, 2,000 articles from 650 contributors, and a formidable if fair price tag of $1,250--was the dance equivalent of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the sixth edition of which, edited by Stanley Sadie, can certainly stand as a model of its kind, as does its here highly relevant offshoot, the Grove Dictionary of Opera.

Everyone must have his own way of judging a reference work such as this--although it is clearly intended for the quick fix of necessary accessible information, it also lends itself to the more leisurely browse for illumination, pleasure, education, and even inspiration. The only reasonable way to assess a work of this dimension is to live with it, and to see how well--in this sense, how adequately--it meets one's needs.

Now, as a working dance journalist, I have lived with this International Encyclopedia of Dance for four or five months, and I have not found it especially useful. I'm not here worried overmuch about its omissions and prejudices, and I agree that it is fearsomely difficult to decide which contemporary figures to include or exclude. But the judgment exercised in those decisions seems oddly wayward. To take just one example--and this seems typical of the unevenness of the selection--what yardstick was employed on giving an entry to, say, Vincent Warren, admittedly, as the Encyclopedia points out, "a much-loved and respected figure in Canadian dance," but none to Kevin McKenzie, one of America's foremost premiers danseurs and for some years the artistic director of American Ballet Theatre?

Naturally, McKenzie is mentioned in the very thorough and perceptive entry on American Ballet Theatre, but even looking that up the eye casually catches small checking errors. Balanchine's Waltz Academy is unmentioned; ABT first visited Europe in 1946, not 1945; its first Odette-Odile in David Blair's Swan Lake was guest artist Nadia Nerina, not Lupe Serrano. These things are not important in themselves, but there are so many that one loses confidence.

Most reviewers of the Encyclopedia have rightly complained about the lack of a complete listing of roles and works for the various dancers and choreographers included--an editorial error of massive proportions--but the whole venture, absolutely unlike Grove, is not user-friendly for the working journalist. It is perhaps significant that Grove's current editor, Sadie, was himself a long-time working journalist. Here much of the arcane folklore and anthropological material--which I trust is a good deal more accurate and less occasionally biased than the material upon which I am qualified to offer an opinion--is probably of only academic interest, and such interest is probably already better satisfied by more specialized works.

The best one can say of this ambitious project is that it is an opportunity lost. And no number of corrections will ever put right the lack of balance in its mind, heart, and soul.

Clive Barnes

Diane Solway has done so thorough a job of research on her biography Nureyev: His Life (Morrow; $27.50) that the book threatens, at times, to become very much like its subject: undeniably historic but threatening to go on forever. Solway's scholarship, which involved plowing through recently opened KGB files and interviewing some 150 relatives, colleagues, lovers, and acolytes, has left her reluctant to discard any factual nugget. After seventeen-year-old Rudik took sixty pages to get from Ufa in the Urals to the Kirov school in Leningrad, this reader was almost as impatient--and relieved--as he must have been.

Of course, few dancers have proved more worthy of close attention than Rudolf Nureyev. A late beginner, he worked and willed himself into a style so defiantly assertive that, for many, its technical lacks didn't register until viewed years later on videotape, out of the glare of his dazzling stage presence. "He knew perfectly well his faults as a dancer," said Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the many expert witnesses Solway has deposed. "I liked his performing but not always his dancing ... everything is about showmanship."

Nureyev's defection to the West during the Kirov's 1961 tour of Paris was so dramatic it made headlines just about everywhere except in the USSR. (Solway's detailed account of his great leap to freedom differs notably from that in Nureyev's ghostwritten "autobiography," falsified by his blithe indifference to facts and a wish to protect the Paris friends who assisted him.) Once in the world's spotlight, he proceeded to do what he wanted to do more than anything else--dance; dance anything everywhere; dance with an intensity and a flair that made him the first male dancer since Nijinsky to gain as much fame, adoration, and clout as any ballerina. Popular journalism's attitude toward men in ballet was never the same after Nureyev demanded and received its respect.

His insistence on continual performance appalled colleagues. "Why do you fly here, there, and everywhere?" demanded Royal Ballet principal Merle Park. "You'll kill yourself." Nureyev snapped, "Girl, what better way to die?" He came close to doing just that in 1976, after dancing Sleeping Beauty at a Paris performance by London Festival Ballet with a 103-degree temperature and a case of pneumonia, then flying to Los Angeles to dance his production of Raymonda with American Ballet Theatre. Only a curious inability to breathe prevented his attending the cast party afterward. He was inactive for an entire month. He didn't stop dancing until 1991, after AIDS had drained his energy and he was reduced to appearing in such humble British venues as the Cambridge Corn Exchange.

Inevitably, a biography as conscientious as this one about a subject as Technicolored as Nureyev often becomes an unsettling study in contrasts. He left an estate estimated at up to $30 million, due in part, dozens of eyewitnesses attest, to a miserly inability to pick up a check or stay at a hotel in any city where an acquaintance lived. "So vivid was his presence, so palpable his will that his friends invariably found themselves caught up in his force field," Solway writes. "His needs came first ... and he had no compunction about satisfying them." Long-suffering friends were also frequent recipients of unexpected kindnesses. He squeezed unprecedented fees out of impresarios and companies, but when he performed with the Martha Graham Dance Company, he never asked for money.

His stormy relationship with the Paris Opera Ballet, where he served as director from 1983 to 1989, found him alternating between his best and worst. His disdain for the company's stultifying traditions of seniority led to salubrious promotions of excellent young dancers, yet all too often they wound up performing his own dismaying, often tasteless choreography. (Erik Bruhn dismissed his Swan Lake as "cluttered with too many steps.") The first two acts of Natalia Makarova's 1981 revival of La Bayadere for ABT truly look "after Petipa." In Nureyev's folksy 1992 version for the Opera, these acts look "after Moiseyev." The crucial third act, "The Kingdom of the Shades," was nevertheless danced by the Opera on its 1996 New York City tour with such vitality and purity that audiences felt they had witnessed not a performance but a demonstration of dedicated moral authority. Plainly an iron will had been brought to bear on this company, and it hadn't been Petipa's.

Occasionally, Solway appears bedazzled by the glitterati who welcomed Nureyev into their midst. There are far too many entries like this: "With his penchant for the sumptuous and sensual, Rudolf hired the decorator Emilio Carcano, a protege of Renzo Mongiardino, the celebrated Italian designer whose assignments had included Marie-Helene de Rothschild's Paris town house and Princess Firyal's London home." These notables often prove less than gripping eyewitnesses. We are indebted to Firyal, Princess of Jordan, for this piercing insight into why Nureyev asked for the highest fee: "He was in awe of the purchase power of money, with the idea that you can do what you want." Even coming from a resident of a desert kingdom that remark seems overly dry.

Solway's perception and diligence are the book's great assets. Hers will not be the last biography of this mighty subject, but it will stand before her successors like a mountain of precious ore they must mine.

Harris Green