Telling the dancer from the dance

Theolonius Monk once remarked that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. If, by extension, we could then infer that writing about dance is like playing music about architecture, then Colum McCann has built a sonorous, dazzling, multi-levelled tower with his new book Dancer, published this month.

The novel is a fictionalised biography of the life of Rudolph Nureyev, as seen through the eyes of people who knew him: people like his older sister, his 700-performance dance partner, Margot Fonteyn, the shoemaker who made his ballet slippers, and a London rent boy, to mention but a few.

Nureyev went from a barefoot childhood in the streets of Ufa, a squalid industrial town in Bashkiria, to immense wealth and a position as one of the most dazzling icons of the late twentieth century. His passion in performance eclipsed other technically superior dancers, and his charismatic personality charmed everyone from Jacqueline Kennedy, whose husband saw him as a Western political trophy after he defected from the USSR in 1961, to Andy Warhol, who recognized him as one of the first Gods in the postmodern cult of fame.

“The writer John Berger says that ‘never again will a story be told as if it were the only one’,” says McCann. “And that’s very true. One of the bigger questions for writers and people who are dealing with literature right now is – how do you establish a place in history? Why should the story of Nureyev belong only to Nureyev? Why should it belong only to a historian or a dance critic? Why doesn’t it belong to the soldier who came home from the war and saw the boy dance when he was recovering in the hospital, for instance?”

This last image was a point of departure for Colum. “I was struck by the fact that Nureyev’s very first public dance (at the age of six) was in a hospital for soldiers home from the Russian front,” he explains. “It was a fact glossed over in the biographies. I wanted to know more.”

McCann embarked on a body of painstaking research that involved exploring everything from the making of ballet shoes to French cookery.

“I got to read Red Army booklets from 1941, dance dictionaries, biographies, depictions of the gay world in the 1970s, articles about Nureyev, celebrity quotes, weather reports from southern Russia, you name it! For instance, when I started to write the book, I knew nothing about dance. But I began watching dance classes and then I went to Russia during the summer of 2001.”

As opposed to doing interviews, he preferred simply to walk around St. Petersburg, visiting graveyards, sitting in the stairwells of apartment buildings and hanging out in cafés, to get the feel rather than the facts of the place.

“It was a very long and complicated process, and at times I was really ready to give up,” he admits. “But stuff kept happening that made me go on. For instance, the day after I saw a performance at the Kirov, I went to see if I could get inside to visit. It turned out that I couldn’t, because the director was absent, so that was really disappointing. I went for a wander around the city and ended up in this place called the Shamrock Bar (seriously!) and decided to go in for a pint. Purely for research purposes of course!”

Nureyev’s heyday is swirled through in a series of diary entries, where his prima-donna nature emerges. He slags Picasso, mentions Mick and Marianne, Tennesse Williams, Truman Capote and of course, Warhol. He can be intolerable, vicious, and yet at times excessively generous. These conflicting traits are ably depicted throughout. The dancer basks in his success, but longs for his family. While he amuses himself no end abusing rich American culture-groupies and sleeping with everything that moves, one close friend, after an evening of excess, is moved to note: “here comes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.”

These ambient details are striking, as Nureyev is refracted through a revolving prism with a number of angles, as opposed to being viewed through just one lens.

“You could talk about Nureyev in terms of facts and figures,” says McCann, “but facts can be bought and sold, whereas atmosphere, texture and feeling can’t. To a large extent, it’s the shadow of Nureyev that lurks behind the novel rather than the figure himself. But I think that he would recognise himself. He would probably give me a good kick in the arse for writing some of it …”

This might well refer to descriptions of Nureyev’s experiences in the heyday of the ’70s pre-AIDS gay bacchanale. At one point he leaves a theatre during a performance for a sexual tryst in a public toilet, all part of the legend, but a difficult subject to handle.

“I don’t think it’s any more or less extraordinary to get the voice of a gay man in the 1970s than it is to get the voice of a Russian woman in the 1940s,” Colum observes. “But knowing that people would be looking at that even more closely, I interviewed gay men in New York who would be quite open about what they were up to. Most of this is - and I don’t say this with a smirk - oral history. It was important to get the temperature and the language right. Once I knew I was going to make that sequence one big long, ecstatic sentence, then all the doors started opening for me.”

The sequence in question takes place over one hectic twelve-hour period, encompassing a party in Nureyev’s Dakota building apartment, a sortie to a gay bath house and a dawn encounter at the notorious gay truckstop on Manhattan’s Westside Highway. It’s one of the most cliché-free snapshots of a once prevalent gay lifestyle ever in a non-gay novel, its portraits of both Nureyev and his good friend Victor at once endearing, shocking and convincing – and it’s all covered in one twenty-seven page sentence, a feat that even Pynchon might balk at.

Dancer is notably devoid of any Irish cultural references.

“Some people say that you should write about what you know, but I don’t agree,” he says. “I think you should write about what you don’t know, that way you can learn about something that interests you, or has inspired you. I have covered Ireland in a number of other books, so this time I wanted something completely international if you like.”

Colum McCann’s first sortie into film came in 1996, when he adapted his short story Fishing the Sloe-Black River for the screen along with Brendan Bourke. He has two ongoing script projects under development (Songdogs and Manlove), and two years ago he co-wrote the screenplay for the Veronica Guerin biopic, When the Sky Falls, directed by John McKenzie.

More recently, he co-directed The Last Run, a drama set in New York, written and co-directed by Michael Carty and featuring the McCourt brothers. It also has a soundtrack that includes music by Shane MacGowan, Paul Brennan, The Cowboy Junkies and Mike Scott.

“It’s about a kid in the Bronx, an alcoholic,” Colum explains. “He decides to give up his lifestyle, and over the course of four days the film follows his progress. But he keeps getting pulled back by family and friends and fate and whatever else. It’s feature length, and a real raw film.”

The Last Run is scheduled for completion in time for New York’s Tribeca film festival. In the meantime Dancer has received almost universally positive reviews. The outcome he’s most pleased about has nothing to do with press reviews.

“Even though I didn’t talk to anybody who knew Nureyev at all, preferring to create fictional characters,” he reflects, “it’s funny, because I’ve had letters and phone calls from
friends and old lovers of his since the book came out, saying they felt that it got to the essence of the Nureyev they actually knew. For me that’s really important.”