When the Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev came to Paris to tour with the Kirov ballet company in 1961, he was “like a wild animal out of a cage,” says Oleg Ivenko, the 26-year-old Ukrainian dancer and actor who plays Nureyev in the new movie The White Crow, out April 26 in the United States. “He got a taste of freedom and another world.”
And once he got that taste, there was no going back — literally.
Nureyev defected to the West in June of 1961, at the height of the Cold War, an act considered treason in the Soviet Union. The …read more
Source: Time
