Nijinsky, Nureyev, "Gods" of dance - Rudolf Nureyev and Vaslav Nijinsky - Editorial

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1995 by Richard Philp

Few artists have had the gifts and the opportunities to revolutionize their art to the extent that Vaslav Nijinsky (1888?-1950) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) did. The young Nureyev was often called the "new Nijinsky" for good reason; both were called "gods of the dance" at various times; and it is still not uncommon to evoke divinity when referring to enormously popular, high-profile cultural, political, or religious idols.

The psychiatrist Carl Jung observed that "Great gifts are the fairest and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break." Both Nijinsky, whose early, well-documented psychosis is now arguably the dominant fact of his short, brilliant career, and Nureyev, whose insatiable ego drove his dancing career long past the time when he should have retired from the stage, were psychologically damaged goods as the result of remarkably similar early years of hardship in Russia, where their phenomenal gifts were first recognized and nurtured at St. Petersburg's world-famous school and Maryinsky Theater. Both left Russia early--generations apart--escaping to some degree the Maryinsky's hothouse environment, but both were basically maladapted to the world outside their native environment. Nijinsky's great dream, even to the end of his tragic life, was to return home (he never did), Nureyev did return thirty years after his 1961 defection from the Soviet Union to the West to give a disastrous performance that sadly revealed the great legend in disintegration. The performance was apparently not important; returning home to Russia was.

Both men have been surpassed as technicians, but their greatest gifts lay in the intensity of their public charisma and a riveting stage presence. Both enhanced the male dancer's technique, as well as the way men in dance were regarded by an enormous, adoring public. Both extended the boundaries of their art: Nureyev by staging the classics he had learned as a youngster in St. Petersburg such as Don Quixote and Swan Lake, and Nijinsky by creating roles in the premieres of ballets that would become classics such as Fokine's Petrouchka and Les Sylphides. Nijinsky's own choreography for Afternoon of a Faun (1912) and particularly The Rite of Spring 1913) propelled dancing into the twentieth century to a degree that Nijinsky's principal mentor, Michel Fokine, was never able to achieve.

Nureyev's own choreography is slight, but his excursions into modern dance and other areas were courageous in their day, and his stagings, which can be seen around the world, contain considerable invention, particularly for male dancers. In the nineteenth century, ballet had become the domain of ballerinas; both Nijinsky and Nureyev, by their examples, have tried to change that perception.

Both men introduced dance to vast audiences. Nijinsky toured with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, a company characterized by such talent and invention that it is a highwater mark of Western civilization since the Renaissance. And Nijinsky was that company's crown jewel. (Nijinsky's 1916-1917 tour with the Ballets Russes astonished Americans from New York to Los Angeles; as a youngster growing up in the 1950s, I remember people were still talking about it.) Nureyev's relentlessly energetic jetting around the world to perform in even unlikely places, as well as his enormously popular appearances on film and television, fueled and fed the dance boom of the 1960s and 1970s--and just possibly created it, as well.

And both men made substantial fortunes as dancers, but Nureyev hoarded, invested, and increased his riches. (See pages 54 to 61 for "The Nureyev Industry," a chapter from the new Nureyev biography, Perpetual Motion, by Otis Stuart. Nijinsky's wealth--quite substantial for those days--was lost as a result of years of costly hospitalization, mismanagement, and the indulgences of an erratic, avaricious, and psychotic wife.

Both dancers had a history of multiple sex partners, although Nijinsky's numerous couplings did not contribute to his death (in 1950 from kidney disease), whereas Nureyev's escapades did, in 1993 from AIDS, a disease unknown in Nijinsky's day. Nureyev's reportedly destructive behavior, however, was such that he knew for almost a decade prior to his death that he was HIV-positive and, according to Peter Watson's recent controversial biography, refused to take any precautions or to alter his sexual behavior in any way. If true, this behavior is difficult to offset by the apologists who point to Nureyev's other, more generous acts during the same period, such as assisting the destitute Margot Fonteyn.

But Nijinsky and Nureyev knew very well the dark side of the human psyche, and both lived with their own relentless demons. Peter Ostwald, a psychiatrist, has written a fascinating account of the origins, manifestations, and treatment of Nijinsky's illness in his Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (1991). Ostwald was the first researcher to ferret out Nijinsky's surviving medical records, and he concludes that Nijinsky was not so much "mad" as he was the subject of misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment, and experimental medicine. Knowing this, of course, only makes the tragedy that much more affecting. The untimely loss to the dance world of both Nijinsky and Nureyev, from today's perspective, seems unnecessary; we might have benefited from their wisdom that would have come with age.