Roberto Bolle on why Natalie Portman should give back her Oscar… and more

I agree with Roberto Bolle that an artist’s sexuality is his or her private business. To define oneself according to one’s sexuality is to deny the over-arching importance of one’s humanity. Let me break it to you gently. One day your hormones will no longer rage and sex will be the last thing on your mind. Will that mean you are no longer human? Of course not. Bolle is a human being as well as an artist. He deserves a right to privacy. He cares deeply about the public he serves. Have you ever seen him work a crowd when he exits the stage door? He spends loads of time after every performance stopping to chat with each person, have his photograph taken with anyone who asks, sign autographs, engage in conversations, accept gifts he never asked for and probably doesn’t even want. He is a true star. Such a person cares deeply about the public he serves. Bolle is aware of the romantic projections of both women and men on him as a performer. Why should he limit the fantasies of his audience by announcing his sexual identity? What if it were to limit the roles he were offered? He’s not only a great dancer but a great actor. An artist is a type of public servant and for this reason is entitled to remain above the fray. His privacy is something he must protect should he wish to keep his creative reserves in tact. As to your challenging Bolle on an ethical basis, assuming you know all about him just because of the impression he makes, did it ever occur to you that he is Italian and grew up in a Catholic culture and lives in a Catholic culture today? Whoever he is sexually, he is resolved about that aspect of his life and doesn’t need to discuss it with anyone. Being gay isn’t a handicap. A gay person has no obligation to confess it publicly. What value would that create? Making rigid rules about how to handle diversity denies the humanity of a person who is different.

What’s this nonsense about your saying Nureyev was “dark?” There wasn’t a more joyful, humorous, well-adjusted man on the face of the earth than Rudolf Nureyev. He didn’t do drugs, he took care of his body, he made his way in the world completely on his own and against all odds. He had enormous numbers of truly close friends. He had a merciless work ethic that ate up the majority of his time and energy. But he knew how to have a good time. He had a grand life, a wonderful life. True, in middle age he danced too long and he maybe became a little sad and lonely. Being a millionaire and owning his own private island must have taken the edge off of that–just a little bit. Maybe he spent too much time at the Baths. But that was a cultural trend among gay men at the time, not his personal form of self-destruction. Even in middle age he was still rehearsing every single performance in its entirety before the show went on. That was what he demanded of himself in order to be able to say that he had given his best performance. That may have been the most extreme aspect of personality–his obsession with work. He had a zany sense of humor and liked to act like a maniac just for fun. He was witty. He liked to laugh. Sometimes, especially as time wore on, he relied on staging scenes before a performance. If you have ever been a performer you understand how that works. The rush of adrenaline from the sensation of organic anger gives a performer ten times the energy as he goes onstage and enables him to fly through a performance. He wanted to do his very best, always, whether he was dancing in London, New York, Timbuktu or Detroit. How dare you say he had a “dark” side. By the end of the 20th century, he was one of the few real men left on the planet. No matter what Balanchine said about him behind his back–from the very beginning Balanchine was threatened by him and gossiped viciously about him–Nureyev never said a bad word about Balanchine or expressed anything but respect and admiration for Balanchine. You will be very hard pressed to find anything in print that Nureyev ever said about Balanchine that is negative. That is because Nureyev was a man. A grown up. He had integrity. He was not a conflicted, pathetic, dark, twisted person struggling to get through the day. Great dancers must have great character to keep up their careers if they want them to last for more than a decade. It’s too hard even when they have full, happy lives. Projecting nonsense about “darkness” on a person like Nureyev, who planted the seeds for the growth of the ballet audience we have today in the west during the first ten years following his defection is utter rubbish. Bolle’s answers are spot on. Like he said, he, too, is living proof that you don’t have to be “dark” to be a great artist.

The poet, John Keats is the one who popularized the notion of the necessity of exploring darkness in art with his literary theory of what he called “negative capability”–allowing the bent in a work of art to go into a place where questions remained unanswered and the inclusion of the irrational remains an option. Look it up. Our culture is still dominated by the Romantic poets. But Keats himself was a joyful, life-loving person who cherished every hour he had on this earth, knowing within a year of his younger brother’s death that he too, would die young. He had one true love whom he never got to have sex with because he had syphilis and, knowing he would die soon, had too much character to ruin her by marrying her and leaving her a penniless, syphilitic widow. He abstained. He had many, many friends, and had just published his last volume of poetry before he died. It received mixed reviews. He became a literary superstar after his death. But he had known happiness. He did not value “darkness” for its own sake but as a new dimension of intellectual life and creativity that deserved to be explored because it might too be related to truth. He wasn’t interested in pat answers or cliches. You’re trying to make darkness a predictable aspect of an artist’s nature. Nothing could be further from Keat’s notion of negative capability.