Lynn Seymour

Lynn Seymour reflects on Rudolf Nureyev: extracts from an interview with Sir John Tooley.

Seymour:
My first encounter with Rudolf was back in the sixties when he first came to London and I was rehearsing Flower Festival with Genzano with some others of my colleagues. We were taught by Erik Bruhn. Rudolf came to the rehearsal because he wanted to learn the dances himself. We immediately hit it off because he instinctively and impulsively and generously started helping everybody. He also, I think, recognized a fellow struggler in myself because I was far from the best of the group, but I was a very determined sort of individual and I think he liked that, so we warmed to each other right away.

Tooley:
You’ve touched upon one of the extraordinary qualities of Rudolf, which was a generosity to all his colleagues. He could be ferocious in all sorts of directions and even ferocious with his colleagues too, but essentially he was a man of real generosity of spirit and a willingness to help, just as was Maria Callas.

As I remember it, the first production you took part in was one of Rudolf’s – La Bayadère – and you were one of the three ballerinas, along with Merle Park and Monica Mason. Could you talk a little bit about that because it was first time Rudolf mounted a production in Europe and indeed on the Royal Ballet?

Seymour:
Well, in fact, before La Bayadère we did a MacMillan ballet called Images of Love In which Rudolf and I danced together with Christopher Gable. We became very good friends. I think we’d had a company tour in between where we discovered that we both loved hats and he taught me how to pack. I never had room for my hats – and he always managed to accommodate them – so I had my first really good lesson in good packing for long tours!

But La Bayadère really was, for me, a fantastic time because by this time Rudolf was a friend and he was very candid with me. The three soloists had very difficult little variations to do and the rest of the work they had to do was pretty thankless actually, and very hard. He gave me the worst and most thankless solo. It wasn’t showy, it wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t charming. It was slow, it was a balancing act, it was dull and kind of finished on a funny up note that didn’t really make you feel that it had ended and it was really hard.

I said to him one day when I was struggling away with it, ‘Rudolf, why did you give me this solo? I’m not the strongest person here’. And he said, ‘You are the only one I thought that could make something of it! You’re such a good actress!’.

So I said, ‘Do you mean classical ballet is all about acting too?’ and he said, ‘no, far from it’. Well, we were joking, but what he taught me was something that was against my grain, as I had always considered that when you are on the stage it was a place of mystery, of magic, and what you didn’t want the public to see you didn’t show them. So no matter what, you would disguise difficulties with apparent ease, keep a pleasant look on your face and never show that anything was amiss. 

Well, Rudolf didn’t seem to follow this at all and in fact he was famous for stopping orchestras and starting all over again and slamming into the 5th position with a really, really horrible look on his face. I didn’t agree with that, but nonetheless he taught me how rigorous you had to be when doing a purely classical ballet. There were no short cuts, there was no way to disguise your shortcomings so the best way of making a good fist of it was to be brutally honest in your execution and faithful to the hardships, so that you spared yourself nothing by plastering over a crack but it was an honest attempt, was his view. It took a lot of courage to do that sort of thing. But it was a great lesson for me because then I was able to start to tackle the fundaments of doing the purely classical role in a way that was far more conducive to building and growing and improving.

So I have a great deal to thank him for. It didn’t stop there, the same encouragement went on well after this ballet too, but this was the first seed that he planted in my mind.