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On May 19, 1961, as he was touring with the Kirov Ballet, Rudolf Nureyev made his first stage appearance at the Palais Garnier in the Shadow scene of La Bayadère, earning a dazzling success. The audience discovered a magnetic performer, a dancer both fiery and elegant. Nureyev chose to stay in the West and quickly became an international dancer, invited on the leading stages of Europe and the United States. In 1966, he returned to the Palais Garnier with one of his privileged dance partners, Margot Fonteyn, in Marguerite et Armand.

From 1967, he became a regular guest of the Paris Opera performing great roles of the repertoire, including Giselle, Swan Lake, La Sylphide… with Noëlla Pontois and Ghislaine Thesmar, who quickly became wonderful dance partners. He was also noticed in works created by the Russian Ballets, like Apollo musagète (Balanchine) or Pétrouchka (Fokine). Named Dance Director at the Paris Opera in 1983, he kept a special status allowing him to dance in 40 shows each season, which is how he performed in all the ballet he created or revived for the Company (Basilio in Don Quichotte, Jean de Brienne in Raymonda, Drosselmeyer in The Nutcracker, the Prince in Swan Lake, Mercutio in Roméo et Juliette…).

Attentive to other choreographic languages, Rudolf Nureyev also danced in the ballets of Roland Petit (Paradis perdu), Jerome Robbins (Afternoon of a Faun), Glen Tetley (Tristan with Carolyn Carlson), Martha Graham (Phaedra’s dream), Pierre Lacotte (Marco Spada) or Maurice Béjart, whose Chant du compagnon errant was the last ballet he danced on the Palais Garnier stage in 1990.

The choreographic works of Rudolf Nureyev can be classified in two distinctive groups: the original ballets born in his creative mind, and those inherited from famous predecessors, which he discovered during his time in the Kirov Ballet before staging revised and personal versions of them.

Among the first ones, in addition to Manfred (1979), The Tempest (1984) and Washington Square (1985), the choreography of Cinderella (1986) is particularly memorable, as he adapted the tale of Charles Perrault to the world of 1930s Hollywood.

His revision of already existing works (mostly creations of Marius Petipa) including Don Quixote (1981), Raymonda (1983), Sleeping Beauty (1989) or La Bayadère (1992), where lyricism and academicism meet and in which he set out to develop a strong symbolic interpretation (Swan Lake in 1984, The Nutcracker in 1985), belongs to the rich legacy Nureyev left to the Paris Opera. Maybe even more than in his own creations, these revisited classics bear “Nureyev’s hallmark”: a technical complexity that highlights the virtuosity of the male performers, as well as sumptuous sets and costumes designed by renowned artists (Nicholas Georgiadis, Hanae Mori, Franca Squarciapino, Petrika Ionesco…).

Nureyev became a legend at only 23 years old. His dance company, the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad (today the Mariinsky Ballet of Saint Petersburg) was touring in Europe. During the company’s residency at the Paris Opera, which started on May 11, 1961, Nureyev quickly drew the audience’s attention. But on June 16, at the Bourget airport, Nureyev was told he was expected back in Moscow while the rest of the troup ought to continue the tour in London.

Escaping boldly KGB agents, he managed to take refuge at the airport police station and asked for political asylum. In the context of the Cold War, he was set up as a champion of freedom and made the headlines. Attending parties, galas and meetings of the jet set while fully giving the extent of his talent as a brilliant dancer and choreographer on international stages, Nureyev was seen by the media as the “new Nijinski”, and magazines enjoyed showing him half naked on beaches, alone or with celebrities, or wrapped up in rich dressing gowns in his sumptuous and baroque Parisian flat on the Quai Voltaire.

The camera achieved to make him into an icon: a cinema enthusiast from an early age, Nureyev multiplied, from 1963, documentary projects, filmed performances, and ballets specially filmed for the cinema, which brought him unprecedented fame among a wide audience.

His Cinderella is a genuine tribute to the studio world. He also starred in feature movies, such as Ken Russell’s Valentino (1977) or James Toback’s Exposed (1983). In Valentino, Nureyev emphasised his iconic image by portraying the legendary Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino. In 2018, Ralph Fiennes’s feature movie dedicated to Nureyev fully immortalised the iconic image of this man who was one of the greatest figures of twentieth-century dance.