Nijinsky (10 page)

The second programme premiered on 4 June. Pavlova and Nijinsky floated ethereally through the melancholy beauty of
Les Sylphides
, Fokine's masterful
ballet blanc
, an homage to the age of romanticism. Here Nijinsky dazzled as the only male dancer on a moonlit stage inhabited by ghostly maidens in long tutus and delicate gauze wings. This was a demonstration of faultless poise, in which
‘every movement
was so graceful that he seemed ideal, almost god-like'. Writing many years after seeing Nijinsky as the poet, one critic could still recall ‘the billowing of his white silk sleeve as he curved and extended his arm'.

Until the Russians' arrival in Paris, ballet had been seen as an all but dead art form. The dancers Edgar Degas painted at the old Paris Opéra were popularly known as Petits Rats (and in fact were taught by a woman called Madame Rat). Far from being objects of beauty to their contemporaries, they were seen rather as drab, miserable little creatures waiting to be selected to become the mistresses of wealthy philistines on a stage that was hardly more than a brothel. Even the physical layout of the Paris Opéra encouraged this association of ballet with selling sex: interested gentlemen could examine the goods on offer in the
foyer de la danse
as the ballerinas warmed up before a performance.
*

The reserved, thoughtful elegance of La Karsavina (as she quickly became known) was very far from this popular idea of a ballerina and, because there were no classically trained male dancers outside Russia,
Nijinsky, Fokine, Bolm and the other male dancers of Diaghilev's troupe were a revelation. Until their arrival in Paris, dancing had been seen as so unmasculine that even male roles were usually danced by women
en travesti
. Not since Auguste Vestris in the early nineteenth century had male dancers of their calibre been seen on a European stage. The critic Henri Gauthier-Villars (Colette's husband) called Nijinsky a
‘wonder of wonders'
and
Le Figaro
hailed him the God of the Dance – a title the French had last given Vestris.
*

Russia was already an established French ally and the object of some fascination in Paris. The great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century had been translated into French and were read avidly. Exhibitions in 1900 and 1907 of Russian arts and crafts had been huge successes and Diaghilev's concerts and opera season had stimulated this interest still further. Russian folk dances had even been shown on film in France in the late 1890s (Degas had painted them). Kshesinskaya had danced at the Opéra in 1908. Still, what Diaghilev's company gave Paris in 1909 was something entirely new. No one had
‘seen anything like it before,'
said the pianist Artur Rubinstein. ‘The music, the daring colours of the décor, the explosive sensuality of the dances – it was overpowering, and quickly became the talk of Paris.' This was particularly true of Bakst's
Cléopâtre
, possibly the greatest success of the season, which had its premiere the same night as
Les Sylphides
.

Although Pavlova had the central dancing role, as the slave Ta-Hor who watches her beloved, Amoun (Fokine), share a night of love with Cleopatra, knowing that he will be killed in the morning, the star of the piece was Ida Rubinstein as the licentious queen. Rubinstein was a rich, eccentric beauty who was determined to be a famous actress. To that end, aged twenty, she had enlisted an adoring Bakst as her personal set designer and he had introduced her to Mikhail Fokine, who taught
her the dance of the seven veils for her own production of
Salomé
in St Petersburg in 1908.

Rubinstein had little to do as Cleopatra except exude a fatal sex appeal, a skill which came naturally to her. Six slaves carried a gold and ebony chest onto the stage, then lifted a mummy out of it which they placed upright and carefully began to unwind. Veil after veil of shimmering colours – red embroidered with silver crocodiles, shot orange and deep blue – were removed until a semi-naked Rubinstein was revealed wearing a heavily fringed blue wig and blue-green body paint, one jewel-encrusted hand resting on the dark head of her favourite slave – Nijinsky (in danger of being typecast) – crouching like an adoring panther beside her. The audience were spellbound by her
‘vacant eyes
, pallid cheeks, and open mouth' and powerful sense of drama.

Like Pavlova, Rubinstein wasn't pretty according to the conventions of the day – Jean Cocteau described her legs as being
‘so thin you thought
you were looking at an ibis in the Nile' – but she gave off an irresistible essence of enchantment. Paris became obsessed: she was seen swathed in furs, her eyes rimmed with kohl, walking her pet leopard on a chain; it was said that she drank only champagne and ate only biscuits; she declared that when she left Paris she would go lion-hunting in Africa; she gave the bohemian Italian poet D'Annunzio a live tortoise with a gilded shell; her romantic conquests reputedly included not just husbands but their wives as well.

Diaghilev and Bakst's association of the Orient with unrestrained sensuality was nothing new. Since Napoleon's Egyptian campaign over a century earlier the French had been in thrall to the colour-saturated exotic. By 1909 the designer Paul Poiret was dressing his clients in oriental-style tunics; Henri Matisse had been painting in Tangier for years; and recently a new French edition of the
Arabian Nights
had been released. Even in St Petersburg fashionable Prince Lvov had an oriental room, complete with tiled walls, tropical plants, goldfish swimming in a fountain and stars twinkling down from a blue-painted ceiling.

But while to the French the Orient was foreign, for Russians it was part of their heritage. Their empire, after all, included Bukhara,
the Caucasus and Siberia. When Bakst and Diaghilev were looking for costumes for
Prince Igor
in 1908, they found everything they wanted – brocade shawls, embroidered collars, kilim coats, fantastic headdresses – in the Tatar markets in St Petersburg. Fokine had amassed a collection of Islamic miniatures when he visited the Caucasus in 1900. And to French eyes, even Russian folk culture as reimagined through the Talashkino workshops of Princess Tenisheva looked unimaginably exotic.

Understanding and absorbing these trends was one aspect of Diaghilev's particular genius. Lopokova described
‘the cunning with
which he knew how to combine the excellent with the fashionable, the beautiful with the chic, and revolutionary art with the atmosphere of the old regime' – all at the same time as being obsessed by the box office. Most important of all,
‘he couldn't stand
anything that wasn't absolutely first class'.

The real power of Diaghilev's artistic achievement, though, was its coherence. The exquisite scenery and costumes, the music, the skill of the dancers and the innovative choreography combined seamlessly to create the impression with each ballet of a single work of art that had reached a new height of perfection, in which the whole surpassed the sum of its individually marvellous parts: as Benois said,
‘not this, that
or the other all in isolation, but everything together'.
‘We really did stagger the world,'
he remembered, and Sergey Grigoriev, not naturally given to hyperbole, agreed. During those weeks in the late spring of 1909,
‘we all lived
in an unreal and enchanted world, which was shared not only by those in close touch with us but even by the public, over whom we seemed to have cast our spell'.

Parisian socialites fell over one another to rhapsodise about the Ballets Russes.
‘Right away I
understood that I was witnessing a miracle … [they] took possession of our souls,' wrote Anna de Noailles. Elegant Madame Greffulhe, one of the season's sponsors, may have been appalled by how
‘drably provincial and uncultivated'
the dancers were when she gave a dinner at the Hotel Crillon for them (Bronia had been right to worry about her hat), but seeing the dress rehearsal won her
over – she was captivated. Perhaps the society composer Reynaldo Hahn best summed up the mood:
‘When one has
seen Nijinsky dance, nothing else matters.'

Wherever he was, Vaslav's day began with class and in Paris it was no different. After a few cups of tea at his hotel he would go to the Châtelet and go through his daily routine while Maestro Cecchetti watched over him with bright, critical eyes, his cane banging time on the floor, shouting out instructions in his fabulously idiosyncratic mixture of Italian, French and Russian. The other dancers said that he could
walk upright
between Nijinsky's legs when Nijinsky jumped.

Bronia, who knew her brother's practice intimately and recognised its intensity, described how he would work through the barre exercises at an accelerated tempo, double the speed of other dancers. Vaslav
‘applied maximum tension to every muscle'
, practising each movement that he would make on stage with exaggerated force, ‘building up a reserve of strength so that' when he performed it would appear entirely effortless. Even Bronia, with her trained eye, could never spot his preparation for spins and jumps.

His aim was perfection. As Susan Sontag would write in 1986,
‘In no other art
can one find a comparable gap between what the world thinks of a star and what the star thinks about himself or herself, between the adulation that pours in from outside and the relentless dissatisfaction that goads one from within … Part of being a dancer is this cruelly self-punishing objectivity about one's shortcomings, as viewed from the perspective of an ideal observer, one more exacting than any real spectator could ever be: the god Dance.'

Years afterwards he would try to teach his little daughter, Kyra, what he knew:
‘how perfection lay
in the strength of the toe, the perfect “pointe”; that the secret of being light as a feather lay in one's breathing'. Dancing, he believed,
‘should be as simple
as one breath taken after another, and, though every step is a separate action, it must seem to be the natural and harmonious consequence of all previous action'.

He did not need a mirror to correct his faults because his muscular control was so finely tuned. Someone once said to him that it was a pity
‘he could never watch
himself dance. “You are mistaken,” he replied. “I always see myself dancing. I can visualise myself so thoroughly that I know exactly what I look like just as if I sat in the midst of the audience.”' After class he would spend an hour or two rehearsing with Fokine and the other dancers.

Lunch was always late, about four in the afternoon, once Diaghilev had roused himself from the hotel room with its curtains drawn and electric lights blazing, where,
‘like an old Marquise
afraid of the daylight', he had been drinking coffee in bed, reading and dispatching telegrams, scanning the papers and conducting conversations on several telephones at the same time. When he appeared at rehearsals, often with a small group of friends, the dancers fell silent and any who were sitting stood up. He radiated an almost regal self-assurance.
‘With Grigoriev following
discreetly a yard or two behind, he passed through the crowd … stopping here and there to exchange a greeting. Any male dancer to whom he spoke would click his heels together and bow.' Nijinsky, of course, was the one exception to this custom, confirmation (if any were needed) of the chasm that existed between him and the other dancers.

After lunch Vaslav might drive through the Bois de Boulogne with Nouvel or Bakst or go to the Louvre with Diaghilev, who was
‘incapable of loving
someone without trying to educate him', before a massage and a rest. Every day she was with them he had tea with his mother.

On the nights he was performing, Vaslav would arrive at the Châtelet at about half past six or seven. He would change back into practice clothes – slim black trousers and a loose silk shirt – and go through class alone at the back of the stage, avoiding any conversation. Then he would return to his dressing room, to which only Diaghilev's valet Vasily Zuikov was admitted – even Diaghilev was barred. Benois described Zuikov as independent-minded but totally devoted to his master,
‘a capacity
Diaghilev perceived at once, for he possessed a wonderful gift of detecting all kinds of talent'. He relayed all the company gossip back
to Diaghilev and was charged with keeping a close eye on Diaghilev's
‘pride and joy'
– Nijinsky.

Vaslav kept his dressing room austerely tidy, with his sticks of Leichner greasepaint and new pairs of shoes laid out in neat rows. Zuikov was in charge of these glove-leather shoes, ordered specially from Milan (and later London), and of his costumes. Vaslav might go through two or three pairs of shoes a night. It was here, while Vaslav dressed and put on his make-up (something he always did himself, part of his creation of the character), that a metamorphosis took place and the awkward young man would enter into a
‘new existence'
. Which of these creatures, the tongue-tied boy in one of his two slightly ill-fitting suits or the graceful, composed artist who seemed to breathe different air from his audience, was the real Nijinsky?

His mother, dressed in a newly bought evening gown, paid for by her son, came backstage to bless him before the curtain rose but Nijinsky – unusually for dancers at this time – didn't cross himself before a performance. The dancers' real sacrament was coating their shoes in rosin so they wouldn't slip on stage, pressing their toes into the box with a distinctive grating sound. One of the dancers in her troupe gave a marvellous description of Pavlova quivering on pointe in the rosin box at the side of the stage, grinding her toes into the rosin as deeply as possible while crossing herself with fluttering,
‘uncanny swiftness'
as if ‘doing a special little
divertissement
for the pleasure of Jesus'. She would do this once on a normal night or over and again if she was nervous.