Nijinsky, Vaslav

views updated

NIJINSKY, VASLAV

NIJINSKY, VASLAV (1890–1950), Russian dancer.

Born in Kiev on 12 March (28 February, old style) 1890 on a tour of his dancer-parents Eleonora Bereda and Thomas Nijinsky, Vaslav Fomich Nijinsky entered the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet School in 1898, graduating from there in 1907. That same year he joined the Maryinsky Theater, where he had already appeared as a pupil in Michel Fokine's Acis et Galatée (1905), in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1906), and with Anna Pavlova in Fokine's Pavillon d'Armide (1907). A sensational success, he soon became the partner of Mathilde Kschessinska, Olga Preobrajenska, and Tamara Karsavina. He was befriended by Sergei Diaghilev, who saw in the young dancer not only a potential lover but also someone to star in the Paris seasons of the Ballets Russes.

With the Ballets Russes he was idolized for his performances in the classics and in Fokine's Les Sylphides and Cleopatra (1909), Carnaval and Schéhérazade (1910), and Le Spectre de la rose, Narcisse, and Petrushka (1911). Audiences went wild for his amazing virtuosity (he had exceptional elevation, executing entrechats huit and dix); he could be savagely sexual as the Golden Slave in Schéhérazade, or dreamily romantic as the spirit in Spectre de la rose. The costume he wore for Giselle

at the Maryinsky Theater was considered indecent, and the ensuing scandal (which some claimed Diaghilev masterminded) made him resign from the Maryinsky in 1911.

Now free to devote his energies to Diaghilev full-time, Nijinsky became not only the main attraction of the Ballets Russes but also their choreographer. Diaghilev had established his company as a permanent touring ensemble for which he urged Nijinsky to create innovative works. The resulting ballets were among the most controversial in the entire history of ballet and are considered to foreshadow the many developments of later avant-garde choreography. His choreography was a revolutionary break with tradition in, for example, L'Après-midi d'un faune (1912), Jeux (1913), and Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). Like Fokine's, his movements were molded to reflect the different settings: in L'Après-midi d'un faune steps were seen in profile like Greek friezes, and inLe Sacre du Printemps the language of the body was turned in on itself when the dance became flat-footed and convulsive. The brazen modernity of his ballets, and the overt eroticism of Faune, provoked strong reactions from audiences and notorious riots in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

While on tour in South America in 1913, Nijinsky married the Hungarian dancer Romola de Pulszky, an act that so infuriated Diaghilev that he fired Nijinsky. The break between Nijinsky and his older impresario-lover marked the beginning of Nijinsky's decline into mental illness. He tried to establish a company of his own in 1914, but it failed after only sixteen days at the Palace Theatre in London. He went to Madrid and Vienna, where his daughter Kyra Nijinsky was born (she became a dancer and the wife of the conductor Igor Markevitch), then to Budapest, where he was interned as a Russian during World War I. Diaghilev succeeded in getting him out of Hungary for a North American tour with the Ballets Russes in 1916, for which Nijinsky choreographed Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel. During a subsequent tour of South America he showed increasing signs of schizophrenia. He settled in St.-Moritz in Switzerland in 1918 and entered a sanatorium the following year.

Nijinsky's last public performance, a solo recital called Marriage with God, was given on January 1919 in a St.-Moritz hotel ballroom. Nijinsky worked on a system of dance notation, worked on plans for a ballet school, designed new ballets, and started to draw while moving from one mental hospital to another. In 1947 his family moved to London where Nijinsky died of renal failure on 8 April 1950. His body was taken to Paris and buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.

Nijinsky was one of the greatest artists ballet has ever produced, a dancer of exceptional ability and magnetism. As a choreographer he had a decisive influence on early modern dance and is now considered one of the forerunners of twentieth-century modernism. Herbert Ross made a film about his life in 1980, while Maurice Béjart choreographed a ballet about him, Nijinsky, clown de Dieu (Nijinsky, clown of God). The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, written over a six-week period in 1919, was published in English in 1936 in a version

heavily edited by Romola Nijinsky. The unexpurgated version, edited by Joan Acocella, was published in 1999.