Any portrait of an artist is incomplete. Neither painted, sculpted, photographic nor literary portrait renders a full likeness but makes a presence of the portrayed filtered through the eye of another artist. Kirill Serebrennikov paints his portrait of Rudolf Nureyev in the two-act ballet to the music of Ilya Demutsky and choreography by Yuri Possokhov.

To make this presence tantamount to the legend named Nureyev Serebrennikov deploys multimedia means reaching deeply into the artist’s personality.  The 2026 production of Staatsballett in Deutsche Oper restores the 2017 ballet from Bolshoi, banned from its repertoire in 2022 after the homophobic, anti LGBTQ laws were enforced in Russia.

Christian Spuck, artistic director of Staatsballett who witnessed Nureyev's creation in 2017, did his utmost to stage Nureyev in Berlin and let this performance live outside the putrid cultural climate of Putin’s Russia

The ballet made its symbolic escape to the West, as its eponymous central character in 1961 and as its current creator in 2022. The full run of the ballet (March 21-May 17, 2026) was sold out early on.

Rudolf Nureyev, the mega celebrity known to the West as Rudi, is not exactly the Nureyev who at twenty-three defied the Soviet system by jumping-literally and figuratively-through the iron barriers of the totalitarian state. These barriers are wittily put on stage in the guise of ballet barres in the opening sequence of the ballet imagined by Olga Pavluk, Serebrennikov’s excellent stage designer.

Serebrennikov, who left Russia in March 2022, as soon as the hypothetical legal charges against him were dropped, uses his artistic license to speak to and about different Nureyev. Serebrennikov’s Nureyev is not only a superbly gifted dancer, but also an insatiable egoist on stage, a loyal friend, an anxious collector of art and properties, a demanding artistic director, and an avaricious learner, who takes the conductor’s baton when dancing is no longer an option for him. In 2017, Serebrennikov’s vision of Nureyev created for the production officially commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre made Putin’s ideologues and theatre bureaucrats grind their teeth. Consequently, the current staging of Nureyev carries the memories of the censorship of its production in Russia.

The two major personae on its bill - Rudolf Nureyev and Kirill Serebrennikov - are Russian artists in large in exile, hence the ballet reminds about the freedom that art necessitates. The first two scenes of the ballet present a rapid passage of history by means of altering portraits on the walls of Nureyev’s alma mater, the Vaganova Ballet School. With the portraits of Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin epochs change but the main patron of the arts remains the same--the state. Does this country ever mourn her lost artists, her wasted talents, her estranged orphans, or does it prefer to silence them inside its vast territory? Who is the old lady in white in Nureyev? She appears almost in every scene, wanders around in delirium and throws white lilies, a reflection on the cemetery act in Giselle. Is she a sylph, a weeping spirit, or a muse of dance? Could she be a reference to Nureyev’s beloved mother who did recognize her son on her deathbed, or even his mother country who mourns tacitly her losses? In any scenario, this recurring figura of melancholy and oblivion ties the action throughout.
Those who saw Nureyev’s dancing on stage could never forget his presence, while the generations of younger dancers know his dancing only through videos and recollections of his colleagues. Nureyev performed extensively throughout the world, but his achievements stayed largely silenced in the Soviet Union during the years of the iron curtain. Nureyev returned to his country twenty-six years after his escape.

Formally rehabilitated from the criminal charges of state treason during the Perestroika, Nureyev made three visits to Russia: to see his dying mother in Ufa in1987, to dance the role of James in the ballet La Sylphide on the stage of the Mariinsky theatre (formerly Kirov) in 1989, and to Kazan, to conduct the State Tatar orchestra inaugurating the festival named after him in 1992.

At 52, with his advanced AIDS, he pulled all his evaporating strength for the last appearance as a dancer on the stage that saw his artistic debut. Never nostalgic for anything but dancing, Nureyev cared that, at least, a glimpse of the grandeur of his artistic achievements reaches the maudit land of his youth. Serebrennikov, not unlike Nureyev, cannot foresee his return to Russia in the current political climate. Totalitarian systems do not forget. Dreadfully monotonous, they punish and exile those who dare to challenge their orders.

Drama theatre and dance theatre are no longer autonomous entities, yet theatre directors rarely engage with the balletic form directly. Serebrennikov, a daring experimenter, sees different theatrical forms synergistically.

In Europe, he is well known for staging operas as well as a theatre director. Serebrennikov also masters ballet’s specifics firsthand. His 2015 directing of The Hero of Our Time, a ballet based on Mikhail Lermontov’s novel, also with Demutsky and Possokhov in his team, charted a new ground in the tradition of narrative ballet, at least, for the Bolshoi theatre. In Nureyev, to which he wrote his own libretto, the action emerges through dance, spoken word, choral music as in the genre of oratorio, a musical composition with a dramatic narrative.

The ballet unfolds around Christie’s auction of Nureyev’s estate in New York that took place in January 1995.

The auctioneer wittily played by Odin Lund Biron, the Minnesota born actor who studied theatre in Russia and worked with Serebrennikov in his Gogol Centre (Biron left Russia soon after it invaded Ukraine), is not a eulogizing narrator but a shrewd seller of Nureyev’s earthly possessions, tokens of his artistic fame, so often mingled with personal attitudes and memories.

Some of these tokens mark longer segments of Nureyev’s life, such as his three years in the Vaganova School in Leningrad, others identify the decisive moments in his career, such as his defection in the Bourget airport in 1961. The costumes sold in the auction speak to Nureyev’s immense repertoire and a tight touring schedule throughout the world. There are also photographs that illuminate his most cherished partnerships, those with Erik Bruhn and Margo Fonteyn, or photographs taken by the celebrities’ photographer Richard Avedon in 1961 and in 1968. Some of Avedon’s photographs famously revealed the living flesh of the dancer up to the unseen. Not lastly, beside the material objects from the past, there are letters addressed to Nureyev from today, those written by Charles Jude and Laurent Hillaire, his beloved French pupils, and by Natalia Makarova and Alla Osipenko (who passed away in May 2025), his colleague-dancers from Russia.

The auction episodes offer delightful, though grotesque in tonality, commentaries to Nureyev’s celebrity cult. It was a propitious idea to engage retired dancers, some of them in an advanced age, as actors playing the public in the auction.  The in-(dancing)-style reactions to each object that they display are theatrical in the best sense as much as these reactions are indexical of ballet as an art form that inhabits human bodies forever.

Serebrennikov’s portrait of Nureyev offers glimpses into the dancer’s self: a visit to the nightclubs of Bois de Boulogne and a Nureyev’s perception of his stardom akin to that of Louis XIV, the absolutist king. Whether the dances with drag queens or the pompous Baroque choir, though musically charming, add much to the portrait or become marginalia remains a question.

In contrast, a reference to the role of Pierrot, a meek and dreamy puppet from Glen Tetley’s ballet Pierrot Lunaire to Schönberg’s Sprechstimme, seems to be a nuanced touch to Nureyev’s portrait, a reflection on his continuous quest for variety of styles, genres, and forms.

Nureyev is not a ballet-biopic, a hardly sustainable genre for theatre dance, although dancing is homogenous to the dancer’s life.

In Nijinsky (premiered 2000, Hamburg Ballet) the German American choreographer John Neumeier reconstructed the story of Vaslav Nijinsky, another grand balletic celebrity. In many ways, Neumeier’s Nijinsky, is a predecessor to Nureyev. Neumeier narrates Nijinsky’s tragic life through a chain of scenic phantasms, fusing art and life in the vortex of the artist’s imagination. Nijinsky’s dancing, however, keeps its mystery, as only static images and written descriptions testify to the unmatched power of his stage presence. Nureyev’s video record is extensive; his colleagues, who danced in Nureyev’s productions under his merciless eyes, restage his ballets every season, passing the master’s technique and his stage drive to younger generations. Nureyev is still a living memory, thus making his portrayal on stage a bigger challenge. Some zealous connoisseurs of ballet could be and were, in fact, dismissive of anyone on stage impersonating Nureyev, though stage directors often recognized that Nureyev’s personality amounts easily to a dramatis personae. In Russia, notably, the famous theater director Roman Viktiuk staged a play The Otherworldly Garden. Nureyev in 2019, in which Nureyev was played by a dramatic actor.

Ilya Demutsky’s score to Nureyev is a sheer revelation, particularly in current times, when new balletic music is rarely commissioned. The score has a dramaturgical edge, but it never overpowers the complex visual texture of the ballet expressed in dancing and projected images. The music fits the balletic dramaturgy filling it with historical verisimilitude. Infusing each episode with the flair of its proper historical time, Demutsky does not make a pastiche of themes from the ballets danced by Nureyev but a reflective musical tableau that supports other visual components. The choral episodes complete historical references, such as the smashing power of the collective over the individual in the Soviet episode and the gaudy thickness of adoration in the Sun-King episode.

Ballet is made of dance, thus Serebrennikov trusts the choreographer to construct the dancing structure.

Possokhov fills the action with functional, well-matriculated dancing scenes that however could hardly express much without a meta-scaffolding designed by the stage director. In the Vaganova school’s section, for example, one feels witnessing the SAB (School of American Ballet) show rather than an imaginary voyage to the old-school fortress of the 1950s. The Grand Gala section presents a potpourri of themes from Nureyev’s repertoire while the protagonist rapidly changes costumes in the loge placed in the avant-scene. The scene has a busy and flowing choreography which can exist in any other neoclassical ballet.

The two pas de deux, however, those of Nureyev and Eric Bruhn, so convincingly danced by Martin ten Kortenaar, and of Nureyev and Margo Fonteyn have a deeper take on the characters. Iana Salenko is impeccable as Margo-restrained, giving, tender, and elegant at once. Both pas de deux evolve from the documentary photographs of the couples. Here, the movements become a continuation of forms fixed in balletic memories and acquire credibility and eloquence. The Pupil scene (danced by Dominic Whitbrook), representing Nureyev’s younger colleagues Charles Jude and Laurent Hilaire, and the Diva scene (danced by Polina Semionova), representing Natalia Makarova and Alla Osipenko, are more deferential to the text of the letters read simultaneously with dancing. The expressive sophistication of contemporary moves by Polina Semenova just attenuate the letters read aloud.

In the Rudimania scene, the provocative moment of Nureyev’s Adamic nakedness seems surprisingly innocent despite expectations. In Moscow, notably, state censors required to cover the dancer’s extremity with a fig leaf, or rather with a nude underwear. To the contrary, the scene’s witty playfulness reveals Nureyev’s sense of privacy and apprehension of the boundaries that he might have broken. There was a mischievous child, at times, hidden behind this quest for freedom. The dance pas manipulating a fur coat thrown over Nureyev’s naked body (he did like luxury items) recalled in my memory another “luxury” moment of his life. During his official tour in Europe with the Kirov company, Nureyev bought a toy railroad on his meager per diem, a luxury he had desired since his poverty-stricken postwar childhood.

It is fair to say that without a dancer capable of creating Nureyev on stage the Berlin production will not be possible. David Motta Soares embodies Nureyev with his utmost sincerity. Soares, the Brazilan-born dancer trained in the Moscow Ballet Academy, danced as soloist in the Bolshoi but left Russia a few days after the invasion of Ukraine began. Shortly after that, Christian Spuck invited Soares to Berlin’s Staatsballett as principal dancer. Although Soares does not resemble the icon by the morphology of his body nor by a lyrical tinge of his dancing style, his Nureyev conquers the public in all dramatic aspects of this role, while presenting a technically honed male dance of today.

Soares’s experience of working with Russian ballet masters, familiarity with traditions, a profound admiration for Nureyev, the beauty of his lines in movement make the stage presence complete. In the interview to Novaya Gazeta, Serebrennikov praised Soares’s take on this role, underscoring “the dancer’s naturally noble stance, expressive temperament along with his innate sexuality.” (24 March, 2026)

The last scene of the ballet evokes Nureyev’s relentless will to continue making art against the disappearing life. It is elegiac in tone and visually gripping.

Serebrennikov merges the last artistic feats of Nureyev in one scene, namely his mastering of conducting a symphony orchestra, of which there were several successful appearances, and the staging of La Bayadère in the Paris Opera Ballet. La Bayadère premiered only a couple of months before Nureyev’s death and marked his last appearance on stage, weak and emaciated, supported by his dancers yet receiving a thunder of applause from the company and the public. The final act of La Bayadère in Nureyev’s version is the heavenly vision of spirits, the fabled “white act” of academic dance conceived initially by Marius Petipa for the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg. Serebrennikov and Possokhov reimagine the descent of shades (fifteen dancers in tutus placed on the stage of the Deutsche Oper in lieu of thirty-two in the Paris Opera, though fifteen male dancers organically complete their linear formation later). At the same time, Nureyev, shaky in movements, descends into the orchestra pit to conduct the music to the last dance of his life.

The angst of death turns into a sweet sorrow of poetry and becomes a tribute to the artist and his beloved art.

Serebrennikov’s faith in ballet as an art form allows the imaginary and biographical events along with the different visual textures coexisting in balance, a balletic balance for a change. In terms of its genre, Nureyev leans towards a balletic elegy, a dedication to the artist from the artist. Serebrennikov’s actual signature appears in the backset in the final scenes of the ballet. In ancient poetry, elegy meant to represent not only lament about death but also required making a portrait of the departed as if she was still alive.
It is a panoramic portrait, one that required a full ballet company of seventy members, a choir, several dozens of figurants on stage, more than three hundred costumes, changing sets, hours of rehearsals. Nureyev’s staging in Berlin was accomplished by Serebrennikov’s dedicated team and by the tremendous effort of the artists, workshops, and sponsors of Staatsballett.

For a moment, Serebrennikov could set aside his brushes and repeat with Lily Briscoe, the fictitious artist from Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse: ”I have had my vision.”