The Nijinsky Legacy
JACOBS, LAURA A.
On Dance THE NIJINSKY LEGACY BY LAURA A. JACOBS At that infamous Paris premiere on May 29, 1913, all ears could hear what sensibilities were not yet willing or able to...
...But de Keersmaeker justified her vision with wit—as when she showed "a world crashing down" by running film clips of buildings being demolished— and with a strange eloquence...
...But the phrase also has a scatological aspect, reminding us of a woman seating herself on a toilet...
...A look beyond logic...
...Le Sacre was bald-faced realism, or as Jacques Rivière wrote at the time, "a biological ballet...
...In keeping with the music and with the sets of artist Nicholas Roerich (also reconstructed by the Joffrey), Nijinsky eschewed opulent/m de siècle romanticism to travel back to the dawn of civilization—and, more important, to the dawn of dance...
...Now, thanks to diligent sleuthing by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, the Joffrey Ballet has been able to present a reconstruction of the original Le Sacreat New York's City Center Theater...
...Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and her all-woman company, Rosas, made their Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) debut last year with the hour-long Rosas Danst Rosas...
...The village hierarchies depicted are as zealously rigid as thoseofbeesina honeycomb: The tight wheels and circulating rows, sharply detailed with arms uniformly angled and eyes downcast, give of f a hard Darwinian buzz...
...Soon all you sec arc her eyes, burning, unexpectedly rapturous...
...Not since Twyla Tharp's early The Fugue had there been such a precocious statement of purpose...
...The Joffrey production does not contain any such elaborately articulated leaps...
...With its geyserlike vertical jumps and piercing focus, this Danse sacrale is where we feel closest to Nijinsky...
...Its fugue-like cyclical repetitions and its eccentric punctuation of "wasted" gestures—pushing back the hair, crossing the legs, tugging down the skirt, touching the forehead—gave Rosas the internal rigor of a computer program...
...This mathematically formal, amazingly complex dance began with its four women prostrate on the boards...
...She stops, crosses her feet with a flick, then laboriously inches her skirt up while leaning over stork-like and making a complete revolution on the balls of her feet...
...Exuding precision, it comes to symbolize the body in privacy and in love...
...At Aria's conclusion the five women are seated in chairs in front of a scrim...
...The Nijinsky legacy...
...The dance opens on a stage that is bare save for a row of chairs grouped to one side in the back...
...The Joffrey's version of Nijinsky's Le Sacre may not incite audiences to riot the way the original did, but it is a fascinating choreographic object...
...Still, Rosas showed undeniable promise, establishing the then 26-year-old de Keersmaeker both as a choreographer unafraid of structure and as one of those rare Europeans more interested in dance than in the politics of theater...
...On Dance THE NIJINSKY LEGACY BY LAURA A. JACOBS At that infamous Paris premiere on May 29, 1913, all ears could hear what sensibilities were not yet willing or able to acknowledge—Modernism rushing forward on a wave of molten lava...
...The women repeatedly slouch over the chairs, supine, as if they haven't the emotional strength to continue...
...She is presented as an object for us to scrutinize, a hood ornament...
...Certainly the dance is more fluent, formal and exacting than the original imputations of "ugliness" and "nothing harmonious" would suggest...
...Nijinsky obviously saw parallels between the puppet-with-apoet's-soul and the Chosen One: She holds her hands the same way he does, palms flat and mute, and like him she leaps limp into the air, as if diving beyond consciousness...
...She went on to describe how there was a precise movement for each of the five counts within the leap, noting that her brother "would not proceed in his composition until he obtained from each artist the exact execution...
...During the past 75 years, however, Nijinsky's spirit has hovered over alternative conceptions of the ballet like Pip's benefactor, a voiceless influence and standard...
...As much about the ritual of performance as about pagan rites, Le Sacre asks Ihe elemental question: What is dance to us...
...As a performer Nijinsky may have thrived in traditional classicism, but he could not choreograph there...
...Nijinsky's dance about prehistoric Russia brought ballet down to earth with a bump, and added insult to Stravinsky's injury...
...Two hours long and without Rosas' propulsive perpetual-motion loops, Aria tests audience stamina...
...Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography for the premiere of Le Sacre (in which he also danced) has a more tenuous place in history...
...Gracing it are many details from Michel Fokine's Petrouchka, whose lead role Nijinsky created and identified with in an almost prophetic fashion (as the world-tormented puppet found liberty in death, so was the Russian dancer eventually spirited away by madness...
...Nijinsky's sister Bronislava, who would have danced the Chosen One at the premiere had she not gotten pregnant, wrote: "Nijinsky demonstrated a pas-movement in the choreography to the musical count of 5/4...
...Having removed their shoes, the women sit down on the floor facing the back wall...
...Le Sacre is farther down the road: It has bloodlust at its root...
...Her reproduction was very pale by comparison with his ecstatic performance, which was the greatest tragic dance I have ever seen...
...Igor Stravinsky's music for Le Sacre du printemps ("The Rite of Spring") was a fierce manifesto...
...Although there isn't an academic step or traditional corps grouping in the piece, the extent to which Nijinsky fixed movement is breathtaking...
...spring seen from the inside, with its violence, its spasms and its fissions...
...Ecstasy and tragedy, Nijinsky's twin stars...
...Le Sacre du printemps is driven by the equating of group catharsis with imaginative regeneration...
...To glimpse Ihe answer just watch how the tribesmen circle in on Carole Valleskey as she shoots up into the Dansesacrale, braids Hying...
...Five imaginary blades drawn across five wrists: again, ecstasy and tragedy...
...Sixteen years in the works, the product is a convincing masterpiece—and the hottest ticket in town...
...Did Nijinsky view himself as the victim in the Danse sacrale...
...I did not warm to the off-color suggestiveness of many of the poses, or the depressive world-view Continental artists seem unwilling to let go of...
...All three struggle against and push beyond the silhouette of classical ballet...
...For all of its rigor, the re-creation is doubtless simpler than the archetype...
...Faune, also in the Joffrey repertory this season, could be mistaken for a self-consciously decorative work that presents stage pictures cinematically (the stilted Joffrey performances reinforce such a perception...
...His three major dances present a coherent line of exploration in another direction...
...As if to secure the point, a wind-machine sends frequent gusts across the stage...
...The exception is the segment containing the suicidal dance of the Chosen One (Carole Valleskey...
...Her conceits are startlingly wrought and unmistakably born of the flesh...
...The program notes tell us to expect a dance "almost symphonic in structure,' and de Keersmaeker delivers...
...One of them comes to the footlights and reads a passage from Tolstoy beginning, "How terrible and frightful a thing absence is...
...Dame Marie Rambert, his assistant at the time, had this to say: "I watched Nijinsky again and again teaching it to Maria Piltz...
...As they spin from chair to chair in compelling unison, we see a picture of female hysteria building up into a tempest...
...An early movement that is to become a leitmotif starts with a woman tiptoeing along a circle...
...or you could see in the narrowness of its plastique a "modern" trust in weight and a response to the biological imperative of desire...
...This year's BAM premiere by de Keersmaeker, Elena's Aria, seems to have disappointed some of her following...
...It is a masterful evocation of love's anxiety...
...Compulsive attention was paid to the music's every beat...
...I fought A ria...
...After just a few performances it was abandoned, surviving only in written recollections, one or two annotated scores, drawings, dim photos, and the memories of aging performers...
...During his huge leap he counted 5 (3 + 2...
...introverted energy drives down through their legs...
...All three mingle flesh and spirit in a particularly emphatic manner...
...It did not flatter the superego...
...Indeed, it still manages to convey upheaval, even though it has since been watered down in Walt Disney's Fantasia, popularized through Leonard Bernstein's heavy borrowings in West Side Story, and absorbed into the repertoire of the world's major symphony orchestras...
...His vision of a Slavic tribe ensuring another year's fertility by sacrificing a virgin girl would brook no "pretty," moralizing death, as in Giselle...
...Five women are dressed in tight, short '60s cocktail dresses and high black pumps...
...Far from being minimalist, it was a display of severe self-discipline...
...L'Aprèsmidi d'un faune and Jeux, both to the music of Claude Debussy, are veined with sexuality: Faune is an erotic dream, Jeux a prescient ménage à trois...
...In fact, the choreography here seems to have been inspired by his own history...
...Yet when all was said and done the dancers had hardly gotten up off the floor...
...Aria's early stretches of silence and inactivity increasingly give way to harsh, mesmerizing dancing in which the women trigger each other's responses, intertwining bodily function and romantic imagination...
...It gives us the bare bones of the choreography, not the nerves...
...The dancers are painstakingly turnedin...
...To a gentle Mozart piano sonata they pantomime fatigue, sorrow, then suicide...
...Aria divides into four sections with a reprise and a coda, and within this rather lumbering scheme it features dancing of mercurial speed and risky abstractness...
...Then silence, stillness, until a woman on a chair begins to move...
...The heart of the dance comes late...
...To the blood-pumping melody of the sextet from Donizetti's L ucia di Lammermoor they roll and wrench their bodies in a dance of storm-tossed voluptuousness—thoroughly counterpointed in the de Keersmaeker fashion...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 18
