Nijinsky (39 page)

Nijinsky even came to see Diaghilev as outdated.
‘I could not agree
with him in his taste in art,' he would write.
‘I want to prove
that all Diaghilev's art is sheer nonsense. I know all his tricks and habits. I was Diaghilev. I know Diaghilev better than he does himself.' Creating was the only place where he could both be himself without being desired from the stalls and where he could rebel – against his training, against the traditions of which he knew himself to be a part and against Diaghilev's control over him.
‘Now that
I am a creator myself, I don't any longer need you in the way that I did,' the character of Nijinsky says
to Diaghilev in Nicholas Wright's 2011 play,
Rattigan's Nijinsky
. ‘I must belong to myself and no one else.'

‘Absolutely everything he invented
from the beginning, and everything that he invented was contrary to everything he had learned,' said Marie Rambert.
‘I would not hesistate
to affirm that it was he, more than anyone else, who revolutionised the classical ballet and was fifty years ahead of his time.'
Ninette de Valois
agreed; for her Nijinsky was an even greater choreographer than dancer.

He also transformed the way choreographers were viewed, the respect accorded to the role as distinct from the work. In the early years of the twentieth century the choreographer was still seen almost as a theatrical technician, bringing the artistic direction of the stage designer and librettist to life. But building on the ground that Fokine had seized, with Nijinsky insisting on total control over every detail of his compositions, the choreographer would become for the first time and unequivocally an artist in his own right.

What seems to me to have been modern about Nijinsky's style was his capacity to experiment, to re-examine established ways of moving and seeing and try to create from those discoveries a new aesthetic. Motivated by the same impulses as many of the visual artists and writers who were his contemporaries, he sought to pare down a tradition he saw as having become over-embellished and sentimental to return to first principles. He refused to be satisfied with prettiness or the charms of predictability, seeking instead a new distillation of reality and beauty.

One aspect of this disregard for convention was his conviction that art should not be confined by gender. His willingness to dance en pointe if Diaghilev had let him play the Firebird or in
Jeux
and his blurring of gender roles on stage demonstrates to me not a desire to take on feminine qualities, as many interpreted it at the time, but rather courage in taking risks and a passion for creating something new – a curiosity about finding out what his body and his art were capable of.
‘Had Nijinsky tried
to follow an approved pattern of male perfection, he would never have given the full measure of his genius,' wrote Karsavina. His willingness to challenge assumptions was an essential aspect of what
he achieved on stage. The fact that his sexuality would not be an issue to audiences today is a triumphant legacy for a man who was defined by his sexuality in his lifetime.

It is hard to recreate a sense of the importance of art at the start of the twentieth century. In his 1977 autobiography, the critic and writer Arnold Haskell regretted the loss of the idea he had known in his youth that art was inspirational and important. People were schooled in it, they sought to understand it, they had faith in it as something numinous and transcendant, something that made man greater than a lump of clay or a hairless ape. He mourned that sense of urgency. No longer would a friend bang on his door to say,
Come, come now
; we're going to see Nijinsky. Haven't you seen
Faune
yet? – Don't worry about what you're wearing, the taxi's waiting, we must get there in time – before racing him off to the theatre.

Haskell never saw Nijinsky dance, but those audiences who did were enraptured by him; there is an appreciable difference between what they said they saw in him and what they described seeing in other dancers. The essay accompanying a book of prints of Nijinsky published by the illustrator George Barbier in 1913 raved about him in the fragrant prose of the time, translated by the young Cyril Beaumont.
‘Ah! What poet
could tell of the mysterious boon we accept from this foreign fairy with the oriental face, and weightless body? The spell of his subtle talent and his wondrous youth gives back to us, in desire without a pang, some magical illusion of our departed youth. It is as if this divine genius for defying the earth's attraction and for treading the unseen paths of the air belonged to us too a little.'

The critic Carl Van Vechten, one of several people who ‘remembered' being at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées for the premiere of
Sacre
(but was actually there for one of the later performances), and who saw Nijinsky both in Paris in 1912 and 1913 and in New York in 1916, declared that as a performer he had no rivals. Nijinsky was simply
‘the greatest of stage artists
… he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretative artists do':
‘his dancing has the unbroken quality
of music, the balance of great painting, the meaning of fine literature, the emotion inherent in all these arts'.

Another American critic, Stark Young, agreed.
‘I have never seen
any other artist so varied in his compulsion, so absorbing in his variety, so glamorous in his stage presence as was Nijinsky.' The theatre designer Edward Gordon Craig, who deplored most of Diaghilev's excesses (Diaghilev teased him about wanting to get rid of actors altogether since he so loved abstraction), shouted with delight when Nijinsky as the Rose leapt into the wings, though he found his
‘tiny, almost unnoticeable movements
even more marvellous than his dancing and later observed that all he did was Art'.

In roles that had as their common theme a sense of myth and otherworldliness, Nijinsky communicated to his audience a sense of the ‘saturated moment' described by Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot – a mystical combination of thought, sensation and experience that created a unified poetic whole.
‘Looking at him
, one is in an imaginary world, entire and very clear.' When Robert Walser saw him dancing at Bellevue, soon after he was institutionalised, he thought his dancing was like a fairy tale, with all the layers of meaning that implies.

Nijinsky had a passionate connectedness to his work, identifying himself completely with his art. He was different in every role, submerging himself into the part he was playing without any sense of the post-war irony or detachment which has characterised later twentieth-century performance.
‘It was not only
the face, the façade, that changed, but the mind and the personality behind it which altered. The change was not skin-deep, but soul-deep,' wrote Cyril Beaumont. Reading these words again as I type them, the nature of Nijinsky's illness comes insistently and poignantly to mind. He could ‘play upon movement in the same way that a great actor clothes words now with fire, now with the most melting tenderness'.

Perhaps the closest we can get to Nijinsky today is his various publicity photographs in which the intensity of his gaze and the immediacy of his presence is so powerful that you almost forget you are looking at a piece of paper. When Lincoln Kirstein's
Nijinsky Dancing
, containing
reproductions of several of these portraits, came out in 1975, Clement Crisp said that no live Petrushka had ever moved him as much as these photographs of Nijinsky in character.

The dance critic Edwin Denby noted that in these pictures Nijinsky's poses were never exhibitionistic. He was so centred in the pelvis and, because of that, had such extraordinary balance, that when he lifted a leg it was as if a table was being lifted by one leg while keeping the top horizontal; he used the whole foot, not just the ball.
‘He looks as if the body
remembered the whole dance, all the phases of it, as he holds the one pose; he seems to be thinking, I've just done that, and then after this I do that, and then that, and then comes that; so his body looks like a face lighting up at a single name that evokes a whole crowd of remembered names.'

‘I do not see anything
in these pictures that would lead one to suppose that Nijinsky's subsequent insanity cast any premonition-ary shadow on his phenomenally luminous dance intelligence,' Denby wrote. ‘In their stillness Nijinsky's pictures have more vitality than the dances they remind us of as we now see them on stage.'

What endures of Nijinsky's work is of course impossible to pin down and there is an ongoing academic debate about what exactly he should be remembered for. As Joan Acocella wrote, concluding her Introduction to his diary with the thought that he was
‘probably
' a genius, ‘never was so much artistic fame based on so little artistic evidence: one eleven-minute ballet,
Faun
, plus some photographs'. It is true that no one can judge a work of art they have not seen. But that does not stop me wishing I had had the chance.

Paris, 29 May 1913. Onstage in the noisy, overheated theatre, the Chosen One waits to begin the solo that is at the heart of her tribe's appeasement of their cruel gods. She has been selected from among her companions and prepared for the ritual by the elders of the tribe; the responsibility with which she has been entrusted weighs heavily upon her. The noise of the orchestra – and of the hissing, cat-calling audience – crashes around her like thunder.

Her head hangs down, her heels and elbows jut out, her trembling knees turn awkwardly in. The uncomfortable pose is an expression of her internal state, at once proud, scared, brave, hopeful, angry and ecstatic. Her peers encircle her, focused on her, willing her on to her end. She must dance with her whole self, or the sacrifice will not work; they have chosen her to be their victim, their most precious victim, and she represents them all. When the music begins and she starts to dance, they marvel at her courage, power and beauty even as they watch for her to fall.

Later observers have found in
Sacre
an irresistible prelude to the Great War, the portent of an entire society's self-destruction. The Maiden's obedient, almost joyful submission to the rite, the way she is honoured by her people rather than mourned, the celebration of life and youth through sacrificial death – all these were impulses that animated the generation who fought and died between 1914 and 1918. As the cultural historian Modris Eksteins has written, the Chosen Maiden in
Sacre
would become, a few years later, the Unknown Soldier, memorialised in national tombs all over Europe – an ambivalent tribute to which I imagine Nijinsky would have been acutely sensitive.

Throughout his long afterlife, the fatal, frenzied solo of the Chosen Maiden has become a vivid metaphor for the tragic figure of Nijinsky going insane, dancing himself to lunacy but perhaps only feeling truly alive as he danced. If the music and choreography of
Sacre
‘can be interpreted
as a sign that the end of civilisation was at hand', then Nijinsky becomes at once the emblem and prophet of modernity and its victim.

Very few lives have clearly definable points at which everything changes, but for Nijinsky one of those points was the first night of
Le Sacre du printemps
. It sped on a series of events – events which were
en train
anyway, but which were hastened or made inevitable by
Sacre
's bold, perhaps foolhardy, refusal to cater to the traditional ballet audience and consequent commercial failure, and which would inexorably lead to the tragedy of Nijinsky, less than six years later, being committed to Bellevue as a madman.

Because of his vertiginous fall, the heights he scaled and the depths
to which he plunged, and because it is almost impossible to recapture anything of what he achieved, the memory of Nijinsky survives today like a fly caught in amber. He has become for me a glorious, glowing emblem of youth and talent, cut off in its prime but preserved forever as a reminder that art and beauty will always be the highest of human ideals.

(The sources have been abbreviated in this section and can be found in full in the Bibliography.)

6
‘a woman … in the ballet'
: Z. Fitzgerald,
Save Me the Waltz
(New York, 1968), p. 113.

7
‘We were born'
: Bronia Nijinska,
Early Memoirs
(Durham, NC, 1981), p. 1.

8
This is the date Bronia Nijinska gives (the night of 27–28 February, old time (Russian calendar before the Revolution); see Nijinska,
Early Memoirs
, p. 12); though Vaslav's birth certificate has the date 10 January 1890, it is thought that Eleonora Nijinsky tried to buy him an extra year before he was required to perform his National Service by making him appear younger than he was.

9
‘fairy-tale … so many directions'
: Nijinska,
Early Memoirs
, p. 15.

9
‘My parents considered'
: V. Krasovskaya,
Nijinsky
(New York, 1979), p. 5, from an interview in
Je sais tout
magazine.

9
‘wild, fierce … his body'
: Romola Nijinsky,
Nijinsky; and, The last years of
Nijinsky
(London, 1980), p. 280.

10
‘With his … then again'
: Nijinska,
Early Memoirs
, pp. 20–21.

10
‘How high he'
: ibid., p. 26.

10
‘first appearance'
: ibid., p. 28;
T.P.'s Magazine
, London, May 1911.

10
‘Throughout our childhood'
: Nijinska,
Early Memoirs
, p. 25.

13
‘It was as if'
: ibid., p. 57.

14
‘a charming little'
: Isadora Duncan,
My Life
(New York, 1995), p. 119.