Vaslav Nijinsky - Dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky remembered in exhibition

Dance Magazine, July, 2000 by William Anthony

A new exhibition celebrates a tormented genius who danced, choreographed -- and drew

VASLAV NIJINSKY'S career was a play at the edge of eccentricity. As a dancer, he swung away from his axis to revolutionize the role of the male ballet dancer. As a choreographer, he moved away from the center of the ballet tradition to create the first modernist choreography. Finally, schizophrenia flung him from the center of his being to the twilight fringes of the rational mind.

The myth of Nijinsky has grown up around the romanticized notion of the godlike dancer cut down in his prime by madness.

An exhibition organized to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death on April 8 re-examines his career in depth. According to Erik Naslund, director of the Dansmuseet (Dance Museum) in Stockholm, "The legend has come to overshadow the artist. Nijinsky was a pioneer of modernism in the early 1900s. We should consider him in the same class as Picasso, Joyce or Schoenberg."

The exhibition's organizers, Dansmuseet and the Music d'Orsay in Paris, want to present the various aspects of Nijinsky's creativity and clarify his place among the modernists. More than 150 objects have been gathered and arranged to present Nijinsky as a dancer, choreographer and creator of diaries and drawings.

The exhibition, which opened in the spring at the Stockholm museum, will be seen in a reduced form during July and August at Hamburg's Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe in connection with Hamburg Ballet's Ballet Week and the premiere of John Neumeier's ballet Nijinsky. It will be shown at Paris's Musee d'Orsay October 23, 2000, to February 15, 2001. The exhibition will not travel to America, in part because of the frailty of the light-sensitive paper exhibits.

The first impression of the exhibition is of understatement. Many of the works are small in scale, sketches or drawings in ink, pencil or crayon on paper. The photographs are small and intimate. They seem to be whispering.

Some of the sketches look as if they are fading away in front of our eyes. In truth, they are being eaten alive by exposure to ultraviolet light. Some of the drawings are actually clearer in reproduction than in actuality. The paintings, watercolors and posters are speaking, but in muted tones, never shrill but vibrating with vitality and history.

In the dance photos and portraits of Nijinsky, his body seems to vibrate amidst the motionlessness of the photo. Nijinsky was an artist of energy, shaping it the way that a painter uses color or a sculptor shapes stone. He could direct energy through his body to produce breathtaking elevation or shimmering stillness. He could shape the force of his otherwise withdrawn personality into subtle shadings of gesture and characterization. And all the while he radiated the strength of his sensuality. This is all strikingly evident in the photos.

It was the sensual element, aided and abetted by the openly erotic atmosphere of Diaghilev's coterie, that the public latched on to and that artists seemed most eager to portray.

Based on contemporary accounts, Nijinsky combined masculinity and androgyny, athleticism and effeminacy in a way that had never been seen on the stage. It appealed to--electrified--both men and women. It aroused them, presumably in the name of high art, but spoke at least partially to more basic instincts. The drawings and the paintings, with their own unique beauty, often say more about the artists' own fantasies projected on an image of Nijinsky than about Nijinsky, whose medium was movement.

There are almost a hundred drawings and paintings of him in his most famous roles. Portraits by Leon Bakst in oil (at ease on the beach) and in pencil and ink by Valentine Gross (the sexually amorphous Spirit of the Rose) and Jean Cocteau (a bulging, blocklike savage) reveal radically different views.

A casual photo made in Paris in 1909 is most revealing of Nijinsky's very modern physicality. We see a young man in street clothes with a hint of the adolescent still about him. His body is energetic and alert even through his stiff, elegant coat and high collar. Its frankness and immediacy suggest today's fashion magazines.

Nijinsky's modern physicality created a renaissance of male dancing, a revolution that rivaled the supremacy of the diva, the prima donna, the ballerina. No film footage of his dancing is believed to exist, although Millicent Hodson writes tantalizingly in a footnote to her essay in the exhibition's catalogue, "Two Halves Do Not Make a Whole," about the possibility of a film hidden in South America.

Through Hodson's work with Kenneth Archer, Nijinsky's choreography has been reconstructed, and it is possible to form a new estimation of his importance as a choreographer and a modernist, although modernism is a slippery term.

In referring to Picasso, Joyce or Schoenberg, as the exhibition's organizers do, we must mean a break with tradition and Victorian bourgeois morality, and a radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities; constantly reinventing art; making something new that begins with the artist, not the audience. But it must also mean the development of a new kind of consciousness, obsessed with freedom.