Rudolf Nureyev – Genius and sensuality

A rare portrait of the man and artist behind the mythic rebel

The most authoritative Italian expert on dance talks about the life and career of the great Nureyev. He reveals, along with the stories everyone likes to remember, a wealth of extraordinary details, behind-the-scenes glimpses, anecdotes and testimonies that amazingly no one knew before.

Alberto Testa has created a ravishing and painstaking portrait of the famous dancer. Testa’s approach highlights the intensely contrasting aspects that marked Nureyev’s existence as a man and as an artist. We discover his obsessive need for success and his equally urgent need for freedom; his iron discipline as a professional and his transgressive, mercurial personal life; the glitzy limelight of the international jet-set and his intimate solitude; his extraordinary physical prowess and his premature decline due to illness. A figure of brilliant lights and just as many (yet no less interesting) shadows. The author brings us both antithetical dimensions in a sensitive yet uncompromising treatment that all great human and artistic adventures deserve.

• Published on: 27/08/2020
• language: French, Italian
• Editor: Gremese