Rudolf Nureyev – Genio e sensualità

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.

• – A life that truly seemed like a fable (beginning with Nureyev’s birth on a Trans-Siberian train amidst the snowbound Steppes) told in a highly original way, through juxtapositions and contrasts.
• – This book is distinguished from the other biographies by the competency and sensitivity of its author, the most highly regarded dance expert in Italy.
• – Not an essay for dance critics, but rather a rich story, impeccably documented and filled with many hitherto unknown facts and events. The book appeals to all readers, whether lovers of dance or not.