Neumeier’s "Nijinsky": A Premonition of Ballet’s Future
Neumeier’s Nijinsky: A Premonition of Ballet’s Future
Normally I wouldn’t advocate chewing gum at a live performance; I’ve moved seats for less. But same as you wouldn’t get on an airplane or bathyscaphe without gum, bring it to this ballet, because your ears are going to pop. The term “immersion” is too shallow to express the ocean-trench depths that John Neumeier’s “Nijinsky” draws us down to. His hadopelagic creation mercilessly sinks the audience into not only another time and place but another mind and body. With a mind called mad and a body that was described as the vessel of a god, fin-de-siècle superstar Vaslav Nijinsky elevated and expanded what ballet as an art form could be in the 20th century. And if Neumeier’s pressurized depiction of this man’s life is incorporated into more ballet companies’ repertoires, then he’ll be that transformative once-in-a-century voice for the 21st.
Don’t expect a bio-pic of Vaslav Nijinsky; such a work would never compare to how the arc of Nijinsky’s developing mental illness mirrors the descent of the Western world into savage modernity. By combining images from Nijinsky’s life with iconic images of the World War I era, Neumeier shows us a mad world emerging through the eyes of a man scrambling futilely away from madness. The title character becomes a microcosm of his transitioning world, and this makes him inhumanely powerful in one moment but unbearably vulnerable the next.
Having starred in the 2012 North American premiere, principle dancer Guillaume Côté and second soloist Skylar Campbell return to the role with the same astonishing personal sacrifice and surrender. Playing Vaslav Nijinsky is clearly both a privilege and challenge, in a way that’s excruciating to watch at times. Prepare to flinch when the leads hurl themselves into the air only to land with alarming violence on the stage. This visceral expression of sacrifice is so integral to Vaslav Nijinsky’s story, however; he struggled against not just mental illness but also professional discrimination, years of house arrest, and what amounted to indentured sexual servitude to the artistic director of the Ballet Russes, Serge Diaghilev. In order to tell his story, Neumeier has reset the bar for what an artist must give of themselves to a role. When bruises can be seen from the audience, it’s clear that dancing the role of a lifetime comes with a price.
But this is not just a dancer’s role of a lifetime; it’s the experience of the century for an audience member, and therefore requires a surrender from us too. From its beginning notes, this ballet subversively insinuates itself into the mind without our conscious knowledge. We don’t even realize the performance has begun as we filter into to find our seats while the curtain is up; a pianist is playing on the glaring ivory set of the Suvretta House Hotel, where Nijinsky famously gave what would be his last performance in 1919. This melts gently into the sounds of Russian conversation when the company’s dancers wander onto the set, laughing and talking before they seat themselves. There’s a haunting mirror-effect that occurs with the house lights still up and the orchestra silent: the real audience is still rustling curiously while being mimicked by the dancers entering the stage. But we’re not being parodied; rather, the protective boundary between the story and us is disintegrating before we can even try to hold onto it.
The mock-audience is arriving to see the performance that let Nijinsky’s loved ones know he needed professional help, and marked the beginning of his life in and out of sanatoriums. According to witnesses, Nijinsky stood before his audience in a white bridal kimono and stated, “This is the war. This is what you all let happen.” Though this is only the first five minutes of the ballet, it is the last time we will see literal, linear reality represented. Once the kimono comes off, spectres of Nijinsky’s mind invade the stage and we never return to solid reality just as the world itself never returned to what it was before this Great War that Nijinsky begins to dance. It’s also the first time that we see the menacing antique chair that will follow him relentlessly until the final scene.
But don’t be intimidated by this loss of literal, linear reality; you won’t miss it. The fluttering interaction between Nijinsky’s memories and the characters he danced are as clear metaphorically as what most choreographers or even playwrights struggle to express with literalism.
We see, for example, Nijinsky as a young student lured by a predatory Diaghilev (played by Evan McKie, who’s known Côté since they roomed together as students at the National Ballet School). Even without knowing the biography behind this work, the complexities of the relationship are made uncomfortably clear by Neumeier’s choices. Reading Nijinsky’s diaries in preparation for the show’s run, I had some idea of the betrayal and disgust Nijinsky felt for his wealthy protector while he was under his power. But even without this background research, the seduction of this still-innocent young man by his employer and mentor very clearly illustrates their unsettling yet mesmerizing relationship.
We also see Nijinsky’s frequently misunderstood wife, Romola, portrayed with compassionate sympathy and are given the opportunity to understand her. Neumeier takes special care to show her as the intelligent, determined woman she was, who perhaps had too high a tolerance for romanticism and fantasy. The pas de trois between herself, Nijinsky, and the sensual faun he portrayed from L’Aprés-midi d’un faune (to scandalous acclaim), show us how it would have been nearly impossible for any sensitive young woman to keep a clear head after seeing this intoxicating performance. Called “le dieux de la danse” at the height of his fame, we see Nijinsky the way the world would have seen him, but focused and personalized through Romola’s eyes.
Nijinsky possessed such celebrity before the war that the stagehand who sold petals that fell from the Spectre de la Rose costume to fans was able to buy himself a house. From a very young age, this was the kind of pressure Nijinsky was under to live up to his godlike image. When Romola is seduced by this “god of the dance”, we begin to understand how she can’t clearly see Nijinsky as a man through the shining allure of his stage persona. But we also see the mutilation that Nijisnky’s human identity underwent being revered so intensely only to be proportionately rejected later.
But Nijinsky is remembered to this day not just for his celebrity; he created and portrayed characters with a new standard of human feeling as no one in the ballet world had before. These characters would previously have been staged as archetypes or larger-than-life figures, and the emotionally profound ballets that are cherished today can be traced back to his influence. Neumeier incorporates these characters into the narrative in a way that allows us to see why Nijinsky’s influence was so important, but also to illuminate where the characters came from in his mind and what they say about him. The alter ego of Petrouschka, the puppet who loved a mortal woman who could not love him in return, is the perfect example of this multidimensional use of Nijisnky’s work.
Keiichi Hirano’s Petrouschka puppet portrays a human’s distress, a human’s desperation, a human’s silent scream, but in the form of a puppet limited to a very restricted vocabulary of movement. He is a creature who can only express himself through dance, but dance is failing him. It communicates the paralyzing frustration Nijinsky had with the traditional balletic vocabulary, a frustration that drove him to create choreography that was in such wild opposition to so many classical rules.
The human identity of Nijinsky and the characters he created are rendered from an extraordinary amount of research done by Neumeier. Watching the first act, I was reminded of the style of Nijinsky’s diaries, written during his first six-month internment at a Swiss sanatorium. At first, it seems that he writes frenetically, without consistency in principal or concern for coherency… but then patterns in his thought process begin to emerge much as patterns begin to emerge in the choreography of this ballet. And once one begins to notice these patterns in the diaries, passages of blinding tenderness and profundity surface through the ink. Watching this ballet felt very similar to reading Nijinsky’s diaries, in that moments of lucid profundity rise weightlessly up through a carefully orchestrated chaos.
The similarity between the diaries of the man and the style of the ballet is imperative, because how else would we understand the contradictions of Nijinsky’s mind? Though Nijinsky describes his world with childlike simplicity, he had psychological access to a well of horror that had hitherto been untapped in ballet. It’s easy to forget, reading Nijinsky’s gentle descriptions of walking on a silent winter’s night, that he is the same man who was determined to stage the violent rites of ancient Russia. The same man who had a young boy’s love of God, beauty, and feeling was also the conceiver and creator of Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), a 1913 ballet famous for being so innovative and disturbing that the audience rioted during the performance.
Nijinsky read about ancient Russian tribes that would sacrifice virgins to ensure fertile harvests, and those who would dance themselves to death in votive ecstasy. With The Rite of Spring, he presented a part of the past that civilized society would prefer to forget with a radical new style of dance. The fights between those who adored the groundbreaking choreography and those who were repulsed grew so loud, apparently, that the dancers could no longer hear the orchestra and Nijinsky had to scream the counts from the wings. Neumeier combines a disquieting portrait of the riot with iconic images and sounds of World War I, turning this single evening in 1913 into a monstrous premonition of the beast that was about to ravage the planet only a year later.
Premonition and portents play a significant role in this ballet, not only with a Cassandra-esque vision of Europe’s future, but also in the personal fear of madness that Vaslav Nijinsky himself may have had. Nijisnky’s older brother Stanislav showed signs of mental illness years before Nijinsky himself did, and died in an asylum. This was an era where epilepsy and other hereditary illnesses were family secrets guarded as if they were witchcraft. No one would marry into a family rumoured to have these curses, and those afflicted were abandoned to inhumane sanatoriums. In this climate of fear, to see an older sibling begin to exhibit signs would have been terrifyingly portentous of a celibate, shameful future confined to asylums.
In Neumeier’s ballet, the role of Stanislav almost steals the show because he must be danced with the appearance of deranged abandon while remaining in total control of some of the ballet’s most challenging choreography. It’s not enough to be a master of technique; this role requires an uncommon personal creativity on the part of the dancer to give this figure of madness the sense of trapped humanity that makes him so disturbing. Which is why Dylan Tedaldi was flawlessly cast in this role. Invading scenes in a straightjacket, he is both the unknowable threat that hung over Europe right before the war, and a terrifying spectacle for his younger brother. He imbues the ballet with a sense of palpable, twisting dread that is only rivalled by the antique chair I referenced earlier; he with motion, it with stillness.
No horror film has ever had a symbol more effective at eliciting an inexplicable terror from me than this wooden chair. It lurks steadily through the ballet, reminding us of where we started in 1919, and where we must inevitably return. If it’s offstage for one scene, there it is upstage in the next. After a while, I realized this chair was not going to go away. At first, it simply made me nervous because Guillaume Côté and Skylar Campbell would leap and spin so precariously close to it. That nervousness turned into resentment. “Go away, chair,” I thought. “Does it look like anybody needs to sit?”
This adolescent contempt for a piece of furniture is a mark of how insidious and subversive Neumeier’s use of the chair is; I didn’t even realize how much I had grown to hate and fear the chair until I saw it re-emerge in the final scene, as inescapable as madness itself. Because what is a chair to a “god of the dance”? Chairs are for those who are resting or cannot dance anymore. A chair is stillness. Most chairs are not designed to contribute to choreography, as in Cabaret. This one, with its restrictive arms and spindly austerity, is certainly not for dancing. This is not a chair you can move in; it’s a prison, as much as an asylum can be, as much as one’s own disturbed mind can be.
Nijinsky spends the whole ballet trying to escape the chair, but follows him through every memory, relentless and indifferent. When the chair re-emerges centre-stage in the final scene, I wanted to yell “Strike the damn chair already!” But that was because I knew Nijinsky was either going to dance himself to death just like the young girl in his Le Sacre du printemps, or he would have to surrender to the chair. It’s always waiting for him. The chair is madness, and he must sit in it.
This implacable witness is always with him, even if only in his peripheral vision, the inevitable fate he runs from through the whole ballet. The tragedy of Nijinsky is that this fate was never one its title character could run from, but what can a god of dance do but keep moving?
Perhaps I let myself become too caught up, but I believe this ballet is designed to engage an individual’s subjectivity right down to its root structure, and to try to extricate myself from a ballet that I am supposed to become entangled in would be to rip a sapling out of the ground. I can only feel what Nijinsky must have felt by embodying his frustration and hunger for a newness that could revitalize ballet, an art form that had been stagnating then for twenty years in Russia.
I was reminded of divers having to slowly acclimate to water pressure: Neumeier knows how deep he’ll be taking us in the next two hours, and we need gradual immersion to avoid getting the bends. “The ballet-bends” might be an expression we come to use more and more this century if Neumeier’s work is shown as broadly as it deserves. If other choreographers are inspired and empowered by his work, they too could create pieces so profound that strategic immersion may become a necessity of the form. So don’t fight Nijinsky; don’t try to keep it out. You can survive the dread and beauty if you surrender to it. Beyond that, I was seduced so thoroughly into Vaslav Nijinsky’s world that it felt I had stretched out my own hands and put on his like a pair of gloves; I had pulled his face over mine like a mask.
In the week that this show has run, I’ve heard audience members say they never knew ballet was capable of or allowed to delve into the kind of psychological complexity generally reserved for the world of spoken theatre. I’ve heard people say they were exhausted after this show, but in such energized voices that I realized we’d all been dancing that night. I’ve also heard multiple friends passionately declare themselves converts, newly-made fans of ballet. This is a piece that not only creates a new audience, but resets the boundaries of just how complex a traditionally wordless art form can be. Ever heard that “there are no mother-in-laws in ballet”? It means that the relationship is too complex to express without text, but Neumeier’s the man to surmount that boundary. I have seen few actual plays, with the help of full scripts and trained actors, achieve the kind of communicative clarity and unendurable intimacy that the National Ballet of Canada has generously given to our city.
John Neumeier has choreographed the PhD of ballets, and these dancers are doctors of their craft for executing it. My most ardent thanks to the men who accepted the challenge and privilege of this lead role. Their courage to dance on the edge of the abyss in order to deliver an unforgettable story is not something that my ticket price could begin to cover.