Nijinsky

by Lucy Moore

  Despite all her fame being attached to her role as a devoted wife, Buckle called Romola ‘predominantly homosexual’; certainly her sexuality was complex. Repeatedly in writing about her husband she marvelled at his ability to assume a woman’s form, imitating the peasant dances and gypsy girls he had seen in his youth and dancing for her the women’s roles in the ballets he was creating in the mid-1910s, and the way it stimulated her. ‘Never, never, have I seen among all the great prima ballerinas anybody so tender, so maidenly, so light, so harmonious, so perfect in their attitudes, and so matchlessly equal on their toes.’ Apparently he even planned a ballet for her, based on Pierre Louÿs’s Les Chansons de Bilitis, arranged by Debussy, the story of a young Greek girl of antiquity who, in the first act, has as her lover a shepherd and, in the second, another young girl – a fable Romola evidently saw as a mirror for her own life.

  Just as much as Diaghilev, Romola was attracted by Vaslav’s androgynous quality on stage and acclaimed it as an element of his genius. Sometimes, she wrote, she felt like the women of mythology must have felt when a god made love to them, because despite the intensity of his passion there was always something unattainable about Nijinsky. Her bias was echoed by Nijinsky’s first biographer Buckle, who was too young to have seen him dance. He described an awkwardness for Vaslav ‘in the normal man–woman relationship in ballet’, implying that he needed to wear a mask to convincingly partner a woman.

  But Haskell commented rightly that it was absurd to call Nijinsky effeminate just because he was beautiful on stage; indeed, in Schéhérazade and Faune it was his overwhelming virility that shocked audiences. Most observers who did see him have made clear that Nijinsky was not feminine, on stage or off. Cyril Beaumont said that rather than seeming to be either overtly masculine or overtly feminine, he appeared instead ‘of a race apart, of another essence than ourselves, an impression heightened by his partiality for unusual roles, which were either animal-like, mythological or unreal. On the stage he seemed surrounded by some invisible yet susceptible halo.’

  While it is impossible and irrelevant now to try to assess whether Nijinsky was a masculine presence on stage or not – by yesterday or today’s standards – what is evident is that for audiences he ‘made the relation between the dancer’s sexuality and the dancer’s art absolute’, whatever vocabulary the critics used. His work expressed ‘Freud’s chart of man’s developing psyche,’ according to Lincoln Kirstein in 1970: ‘in Faune, adolescent self-discovery and gratification; in Jeux, homosexual discovery of another self or selves; in Le Sacre du printemps, fertility and renewal of the race.’ ‘If the trilogy of Faune, Jeux and Sacre has any biographical meaning at all,’ dance critic Arlene Croce wrote in 1982, ‘it is a biography of the orgasm: at first self-induced, later consciously manipulated through the piquancy and perversity of intimate relations, and finally a vast and sweated communal seizure, with death and life occurring together in a shattering rhythm.’

  Freud explicitly associated sex with creativity, suggesting that sublimated desires might bubble up and be rechannelled as art. Rudolf Nureyev agreed. He saw creativity as ‘very much akin to sex, sexual drive or sexual appetite if you wish’ and he, like Nijinsky, projected incredible sexual energy on stage. Since his breakdown, Nijinsky’s creativity – Stravinsky said that his ‘creative imagination [was] … almost too rich’ – and his sexuality have been inextricably linked to his madness.

  Dance has a long association with insanity, most famously in the 1841 ballet Giselle which tells the story of a girl who goes mad after having had her heart broken and who then, after dying, protects her faithless lover from the Wilis, beautiful but evil spirits from Slavonic folklore who dance young men to their deaths. The elegant, elongated redhead Jane Avril, ‘sylphide étrange’ and model for many of Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of fin de siècle Montmartre nightlife, was hospitalised as a girl with the nervous condition then known as StVitus’ Dance before taking her place on the stage of the Moulin Rouge. She was still dancing in the same decade Nijinsky arrived in Paris.

  Even before his breakdown – though most of these accounts were written with the benefit of hindsight – people around him sensed something about Nijinsky that was unsettling. Cecchetti told Romola not to get close to him, Stravinsky detected worrying gaps in his personality, Charlie Chaplin found his presence unnerving, and set designer Robert Edmond Jones said he carried around with him an atmosphere almost of oppression. In old age Lydia Lopokova told author Henrietta Garnett that Nijinsky was always ‘potty. His soul had holes in it, but when he danced then his holes were healed, then he became alive and he was not unhappy any more.’

  I find it hard to believe that the struggles faced by Nijinsky as a child and the tragedies he saw enacted all around him throughout his life did not heighten his vulnerability, making dance his sole means of escape from a brutal world: his father leaving them and the struggles borne by his mother to raise her children alone; his brother’s illness and incarceration; the excruciating intensity of the working atmosphere of the Imperial Theatres and then the Ballets Russes; the pressures of his celebrity; the strains of his relationship with Diaghilev and its devastating end; his haphazard marriage to a self-absorbed woman who worshipped but made no effort to understand him; and the waste and wreckage of the Great War and the revolution tearing his homeland apart – a place to which he knew he could never return. Illness and death were always near. Of his six classmates at the Imperial Theatre School alone, four died tragically in their twenties. He was the fifth and Anatole Bourman the sixth.

  When Nijinsky was diagnosed and throughout the remainder of his life, quite different factors were thought to have contributed to his illness. Freud speculated that schizophrenia was caused by repressed homosexual urges; later psychoanalysts would suggest that overprotective mothering might stimulate it; in the 1930s Anton Boisen (founder of the clinical pastoral education movement and sufferer from mental illness, who believed some types of schizophrenia could be understood as crises of the soul, rather than the mind) thought it sprang from an intolerable loss of self-respect. Alfred Adler believed Nijinsky suffered from an inferiority complex stemming from the social disjunct between his deprived childhood and the sophisticated world in which he moved as an adult, what the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb have called ‘the hidden injuries of class’. Nijinsky may have been subject to all of these conditions, but probably no doctor today would say they had caused his illness. Perhaps Nureyev, who could imagine what it felt like to be Nijinsky better than most, got it right. At first, he said, he had assumed that the end of his relationship with Diaghilev had made Nijinsky go mad; later he came to believe that Nijinsky’s ‘mind broke because he could no longer dance’.

  At times during the last thirty years of his life Nijinsky was brutally restrained and heavily drugged; at others he was cruelly neglected or thrust back into the public eye to satisfy other people’s ambitions. The contrast between Nijinsky before and after 1919 – the weightless figure glowing in the spotlights and the stodgy, blank face of the mental patient – is the most tragic image from the story of his life.

  ‘Balanchine always said that his ballets are like butterflies: they live for a season.’ Ballet is a notoriously hard art to communicate. Like wordless poetry it seeks to express mysteries just out of reach. If you weren’t at a particular performance you wouldn’t be able to recreate what it was like – even if you watched the same piece being performed again the next night. ‘At the moment of its creation it is gone.’

  The art of an individual artist is even more ephemeral. When Pavlova died in 1931, Lopokova observed that ‘a dancer can leave nothing behind her. Music will not help us to see her again and to feel what she gave us, nor the best words.’ But though the best words cannot make dance come alive again, they can help us understand the power of an artist and what he or she communicated to their audience; and the creative memory of other artists, their training and technique, their will to be artis
ts and to carry on the traditions they represent, preserve the achievements of their predecessors in indefinable but fundamental ways. Though it may be impossible to ‘know how the great Taglioni [Marie Taglioni, 1804–1884] danced … her art is not dead. Some little girl in London, Paris or Milan dances differently today because Taglioni once existed. She will carry part of Taglioni with her onto the stage.’

  Every great artist is the product of his training and surroundings and Nijinsky was no exception. His parents’ experience and passion, the tuition of the Legat brothers and Cecchetti, working as part of the Mariinsky at the end of fifty years of Marius Petipa’s supremacy, Fokine creating ballets for him and Diaghilev working to give him everything he needed off stage and on combined to create a background and environment in which he could shine.

  Beyond that it was up to Nijinsky. Technique, craft, experience and practice will only take the artist so far; the next level is a kind of transfiguration, a spiritual awareness, a surrender. This is what creates the sense of exaltation in the audience – the knowledge that they are witnessing something on a higher plane, the ‘spiritual activity in physical form’, as Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have defined dance. With Nijinsky, as Rambert wrote after his death, ‘his technique was completely subordinate to his expression’.

  All the dancers from the Imperial Theatre School had incredible elevation, but what was unique about Nijinsky, according to Karsavina, was his ‘incorporeal lightness’, the way he appeared to float over the stage as if he had left the ground behind. Despite his muscularity, the effortlessness of his style could make him seem almost indolent and his port de bras, though classical in line, according to his training, was unconventionally supple and expressive.

  ‘Never has any other dancer been able to seize upon one’s imagination and sweep one into forgetfulness of the mechanics of dancing as Vaslav Nijinsky,’ wrote his schoolmate Anatole Bourman. Throughout her life Bronia was captivated by her brother’s art, which for her depended not upon his virtuosity or elevation, extraordinary though those were, but on ‘the nature of the Dance, living in him, body and soul’. For Massine, his work was simply ‘the highest form of artistic perfection’.

  Nadine Legat, wife of Vaslav’s teacher Nikolai and herself a prima ballerina of the Imperial Theatres, told Tamara Nijinsky that for her there would always be ‘two Nijinskys – Nijinsky “the dancer”, whom the world enjoyed watching, loved and even idolised, and Nijinsky the “superman” – barred from us through his detachment from the material world which he had outgrown, and to which he did not wish to belong … To me Nijinsky was never mad. It was the world that was blind (if not mad) because it could not see, understand, or reach his height … therefore he lived in his own world.’

  The gulf between what Nijinsky seemed to be onstage and what he really was offstage fascinated his contemporaries, both before and after his breakdown. ‘Where the essential Nijinsky existed was a constant mystery,’ admitted his wife. Tamara Nijinsky has offered this assessment of her father’s character, after years of trying to find out what he had been like: unimpressed by status, uninterested in money, ‘wrapped up in his art for which he lived and breathed; he only felt rapport for people on the same wavelength’. In manner reserved, in speech succinct, he sought ‘escape from people fawning upon him; only when he danced did the incredible metamorphosis take place’. It makes me wonder whether it would have been somehow always impossible for his offstage self to match up to his ineffable onstage experiences.

  Even his friends often thought the dancer was his true self. ‘Nijinsky alone could use his body as a symbol of imponderable ideas while it moved in fluid physical intensity. The world of canvas scenery, costumed bodies, and painted faces, was his reality. It was Nijinsky himself who leapt out into space in red rose-petalled grace in Spectre de la Rose; it was an uninhabited hulk of heavily breathing man that rose from the thick mattress held outside the window by six pairs of strong hands, to cushion his fall,’ wrote Muriel Draper. ‘Atop the flimsy impermanence of a tottering show-booth in a country fair, the soul of Nijinsky questioned God with little useless folded hands, while unanswering crowds of spectators revolved in dead merriment below.’

  ‘You could never believe that this little monkey, with sparse hair, dressed in a wide overcoat, a hat balanced on top of his skull, was the public idol. Yet he was the idol,’ wrote Jean Cocteau. ‘On stage, his over-developed muscular system appeared supple. He grew taller (his heels never touched the ground), his hands became the foliage of his gestures, and his face radiated light.’

  The power of his stage presence came to be an ambiguous burden. ‘Too familiar with the triumph of grace, he rejects it,’ Cocteau wrote elsewhere. Nijinsky ‘carries in him that fluid which stirs crowds, and he despises the public (whom he does not refuse to gratify)’. It was this feeling, surely – the impulse that made him tell newspapers that playing the Rose made him feel sea-sick – that made him so determined to create ballets over which he maintained total control rather than merely dance other people’s ideas of what he did best.

  Fokine had been the inheritor of and challenger to Petipa’s formal traditions of virtuosity and splendour designed to reflect the pageantry and flatter the vanity of an imperial court. Wonderfully convincingly he conjured up past worlds and far-off places, using flowing movement rather than mime to create drama, and he did this by taking the dancers into his confidence to elicit from them the emotions he wanted expressed on stage. Along with Pavlova, no one embodied this style better than Nijinsky, yet when he embarked upon his own choreographic work it was an implicit denial of Fokine’s work.

  Although it is wrong to think of Nijinsky as having rejected the classical canon – on the contrary, until his break with Diaghilev, he remained immersed in it, sprinkling water on the floor in Cecchetti’s class as humbly and enthusiastically in 1913 as in 1908 – he recognised its limitations. He was determined to speak for his own, modern world rather than to create exotic historical fantasies. ‘I do not like past centuries, because I am alive.’

  Having taken what he could from Fokine, he discarded his sinuous, curving lines and unbridled sensuality and violence in favour of almost Byzantine angles, austerity and rigour: no sentiment, no emotion, just ideas expressed as pure movement. ‘What kind of beauty is hidden in this spare, restricted dancing?’ asked Jacques Rivière, comparing Nijinsky’s style to Fokine’s in his review of Sacre. ‘All one can read in it [Fokine’s dancing] is a vague, entirely physical and faceless joy … By breaking up movement, by returning to the simplicity of gesture, Nijinsky has restored expressiveness to dancing. All the angularities and awkwardness of this choreography keep the feeling in … The body is no longer an escape-route for the soul: on the contrary, it gathers itself together to contain the soul.’

  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 th
e 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.