New Role for Nureyev

Across Lincoln Center at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, an evening of sheer visceral joy was conjured up by Britain's Royal Ballet. The chief magician was Rudolf Nureyev, the company's conspicuous permanent guest artist. Following Kenneth MacMillan's disappointing Manon, which inaugurated the Royal's five-week New York-Washington, D.C. season, Nureyev scored a double success. He danced an impressive debut in the comic ballet La Fille Mal Gardee. On the other half of the program was a scene from La Bayardere, the "white ballet" he restaged at Covent Garden in 1963.

La Bayardere is a richly eccentric embodiment of classic Russian ballet.

Glistening white spirits of Indian temple dancers unfold before a bereaved lover (Anthony Dowell) in slowly revolving multiple-image arabesques--728 in all.

Such a repetitious maneuver is exquisite torture for the corps de ballet, but it danced with a purity of feeling and tautness of leg muscle that did not falter. Nureyev's staging was a light modern gloss on the original Petipa choreography. It was also an exercise in personal nostalgia: La Bayardere is the crown jewel of the Leningrad Kirov Ballet where Nureyev was trained.

La Fille Mal Gardee represents a total contrast in mood. In the Royal's English version, choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, it is like an animated John Constable landscape. The story tells of the romance between young Farmer Colas (Nureyev) and Lise (Merle Park), daughter of the ambitious widow Simone. With English country dancing and an intricate cavort around a Maypole, it is by no means all Nureyev's show. The familiar danseur noble, burning with erotic fervor, vanished. In his place was an impish rustic, playing cat's cradle, exploding from a stack of wheat bundles. At 36, Nureyev has acquired a new maturity; his dancing is less mannered. In solo work he seems eerily to be improvising--as if he were taking each leap for the first time. And he is trying out new roles: clown prince, for instance, rather than swan prince.

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