The Firebird was the first self-consciously “Russian” ballet, and it was created (as Benois later explained) “for export to the West.” Like the artifacts manufactured on Mamontov’s estate, the ballet depicted a fanciful world of art inspired by Russian folk traditions. The story was culled from tales published by the folklorist Alexander Afanasiev, embellished and modified by Diaghilev and his friends. A pastiche of ideas and styles, it also recalled Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kostchei the Immortal (premiered at Mamontov’s private theater in 1902) and echoed themes from ballets past. The music, however, was not to be composed by Lyadov, whose procrastination finally led Diaghilev to turn to a younger and less established composer: Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971). Stravinsky was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov’s and The Firebird owed much to his teacher’s distinctly Russian musical voice. While composing the ballet, Stravinsky pored over ethnographic studies of native songs, and the ballet’s folk-inflected sound paid homage to a long back-to-the-people tradition in Russian music. The costumes and decor for the ballet, created by Bakst and Golovin in a vibrant neonationalist style, were similarly ornamented and oriental, and replete with references to peasant arts and crafts.18
The Firebird tells the story of a young tsarevich who falls in love with a princess held captive by the evil sorcerer Kashchey. The tsarevich is saved by a beautiful and mysterious bird who forces Kashchey’s barbarian entourage to dance to the death. Guided by the mythic bird, the tsarevich finally smashes open the huge egg containing the soul of Kashchey, thus destroying the sorcerer and his magic; the princess is freed and the lovers united. But if the story was recognizable, the role of the ballerina was not. As we have seen, ballerinas hitherto typically portrayed princesses and village girls, spirits, swans, and lovers; they represented beauty, truth, nobility. But the Firebird, danced by Tamara Karsavina, was entirely different. She was a bird, to be sure, and the ties back to Swan Lake were clearly stated in the choreography, but she was not a woman or a lover; that role belonged to the princess. To the contrary, the Firebird was remote and abstract, less a person than an idea or force. Like fate itself, she was mysterious, commanding, and possessed of magical powers, not the “eternal feminine” but the “eternal Rus.” Above all, she was Russia as Diaghilev thought the West imagined her.
Thus Karsavina did not wear a conventional ballerina tutu but was instead clad in oriental pants, adorned with decorative feathers and jewels, and crowned with an elaborate headdress. Without the customary tulle skirt dividing her body strictly at the waist, her dancing took on a newfound breadth and sensuality. Even the most classically rigorous steps—and there were many—were luxuriously extended through the full arc of her line, and pictures show her bent deeply and fluidly at the waist, entwined with Fokine (who danced the tsarevich) and with arms curved voluptuously around her own face and body. Her performance was a sea change in the art of dance. If the Imperial ballet had heretofore taken its primary inspiration from France and the West, Firebird dramatically reversed the flow: henceforth Russian ballet would take its cue from its own Slavic past. As Bakst put it, referring to painting and design, “The austere forms of savage art are a new way forward from European art.” It was an astonishing moment: Peter the Great’s “window on the West” now suddenly faced east.19
In 1910 Fokine created Schéhérazade, an ersatz Arabian Nights story adapted from an extant score by Rimsky-Korsakov with a sensationally colorful decor and costumes by Bakst. It featured a harem orgy, Karsavina in alluring oriental attire (including a white-plumed headdress), Nijinsky as a scantily clad slave, and (as Fokine gleefully put it) “a mass slaughter of lovers and faithless wives” fully enacted onstage. The following year Fokine created Le Spectre de la Rose, a pas de deux to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, with costumes again by Bakst and a libretto conceived by the French writer Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, drawn from a poem by Gautier. Its real appeal, however, was not Gautier but Nijinsky, who danced the role of the Rose costumed in a revealing petaled pink leotard with arms languidly draped over his own body. It was a boldly sensual dance of caressing movements and desire, depicting the scent of the rose and swirling, erotic memories dreamily conjured in the imagination of a young girl (Karsavina) just returned from a ball. Nijinsky appeared self-absorbed, eyes averted, arms and body folded and focused inward, but at the end he exploded into a sensational soaring leap through the window (he had to be caught by stagehands in the wings)—not a showy jump but one inspired by his, and her, flights of imagination. To the French, who had for so long ridiculed the idea of men dancing onstage, Nijinsky was a revelation. His moody blend of classicism and sex—not machismo but a fragrant androgyny—redefined male dancing and put the danseur back at the center of ballet.20
But perhaps the most Russian of all the early Ballets Russes productions was Petrouchka (1911), with choreography by Fokine, music by Stravinsky, and a libretto and decor by Benois. Petrouchka was a puppet and beloved favorite of the makeshift wooden theaters (balagani) traditionally erected during holidays in the main square at the Winter Palace. Stravinsky, Benois, Fokine, and Diaghilev shared a fond nostalgia for these fairs, and Stravinsky’s music included strains from popular Russian songs and a tune typically sung by peasants at Easter. Benois later recalled that his own sets and designs were based on memories of visits to these fairs and “the dear balagani which were the delight of my childhood and had been the delight of my father before me. The fact that the balagani had for some ten years ceased to exist,” he explained, “made the idea of building a kind of memorial to them still more tempting.”21
Petrouchka is set in the 1830s (Benois’s father’s era) and opens on a lively fairground with crowds of people. Fokine hoped to evoke a “wild improvisation” and created dozens of roles: “one admires the samovar, another inspects a clock, others listen to the senseless chatter of an old man, a youth plays the harmonica, the boys reach for pretzels, girls crack sunflower seeds with their teeth and so on.” In the midst of these festivities, an old showman brings out his puppets: a dainty ballerina, a handsome black Moor, and the outcast and dejected Petrouchka. Ashen-faced and lined, his paint flaked from years of neglect, Petrouchka is trapped in a sawdust body with wooden hands and feet, and his movements are painfully awkward and abrupt.22
Yet he is desperately in love with the pretty ballerina. She represents the old, stale conventions of classical ballet, and her doll-like features and quaint, stiff steps on toe recall everything Fokine was against in ballet. She teases and cruelly mocks the poor Petrouchka, and lavishes her attentions instead on the sturdy but ridiculous Moor—another caricature from past ballets. Against all hope, Pe- trouchka strains to impress the ballerina and win her love: he leaps, turns, and flings his floppy body into virtuosic feats that disintegrate into broken-limbed distortions and collapsed, jerky gestures. At the end, he is struck down by the Moor and lies dead in a heap on the stage as the fair draws to a close and the crowds disperse. Suddenly, however, the trumpets blare out the poor puppet’s anguished theme and the real Petrouchka—the soul of Petrouchka—appears flung over the roof of the fair booth. He reaches out desperately into the darkness and summons the strength to throw a final heart-wrenching kiss to his beloved before he collapses.
In one key, Petrouchka was a charming portrait of an old-world Russian tradition, but it was Nijinsky’s devastating and poignant portrayal of the forlorn puppet that signaled the ballet’s true import. Nijinsky was the undisputed star of the Russian ballet, and his technical brilliance was unsurpassed, yet it was in the ungainly but soulful spirit of this rag doll that he found himself. Indeed, in Nijinsky’s performance the ballet may have become more radical—more fragmented and physically dislocated—than Fokine, who had always prized lyricism and the picturesque, had intended. Petrouchka was Fokine’s last truly great ballet, and in many ways it overtook him: he found Stravinsky’s music disconcerting and “nondanceable,” insisting it had “overshot” its mark. Nijinsky, however, knew otherwise: he understood t
he music’s irony and dissonance, and his movements brought out its urgent pulse. The following year Stravinsky wrote to his mother, “I consider Fokine finished as an artist.…It’s all just habileté, from which there’s no salvation!” Diaghilev, who was in any case tired of Fokine’s arrogant, diva-like behavior, did not wait to act. In 1912 Nijinsky became the chief choreographer for the Ballets Russes.23
Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev around 1889. His parents were Polish itinerant dancers (Vaslav made his stage debut at a circus when he was seven), but when his father abandoned the family, his mother settled in St. Petersburg and enrolled Vaslav and his sister Bronislava at the Theater School. Nijinsky’s talent was immediately apparent and his rise to stardom meteoric: upon his graduation in 1907, he was cast in major roles. But in spite of this early recognition and success, Nijinsky felt unsettled and restless, an inveterate outsider. Isolated by culture and language (he spoke Polish at home), he had been jeered by fellow students who called him “Japonchek” for his slanting eyes. He was willful, self-driven, and resentful of authority and happily joined Pavlova for private lessons with Cecchetti, seeing himself as one of the new generation of innovators in dance.
When he met Diaghilev, the two men became lovers. Diaghilev’s passion for ballet had always been tangled with sex and love, and in a pattern the impresario would repeat with all of his favorites but which bonded him especially to Nijinsky, Diaghilev personally supervised the young dancer’s education, dispatching Nijinsky to museums, churches, and other historic sites and introducing him to a wide society of musicians, painters, and writers in Russia and across Europe. Under Diaghilev’s tutelage, Nijinsky’s artistic horizons broadened immeasurably, but his near-total dependence on Diaghilev—psychological, sexual, and financial (he did not receive a salary with the Ballets Russes; instead Diaghilev footed his bills)—also intensified his isolation and eccentricities. He did not speak French or English, and—already by nature obsessive and self-absorbed—he retreated increasingly into his art.
As it turned out, Nijinsky was heterosexual, or at least bisexual, and in spite of his relationship with Diaghilev he had strong but often frustrated and confused desires for women. Still, homosexuality was a key element in shaping his art and that of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev’s homosexuality was openly established and he loved and promoted many of his star male dancers, from Nijinsky to (later) Léonide Massine and Serge Lifar. But homosexuality at the time was not only a personal preference, it was also a cultural stance: against bourgeois morality, with its stiffly constraining style and etiquette. It was also an assertion of freedom—freedom for a man to appear “feminine” or (in Nijinsky’s case) androgynous, perhaps, but above all to be experimental and to follow inner instincts and desires rather than social rules and conventions. It is no accident that so many twentieth-century modern artists and those involved with dance in particular were homosexual, or that sexuality was a genuine source of artistic innovation.
We have no films of Nijinsky’s dancing, but from photos, paintings, sculptures, and literary accounts along with his sister’s descriptions of how he trained himself, we can say something about how he moved. Nijinsky had an unusual body: he was just five feet four inches in height, and had a long, thick neck, and narrow, femininely sloping shoulders, muscular arms (he lifted weights), and a slim, elongated torso. His legs were short and bulky and he had massive, grasshopper-like thighs—his suits had to be specially tailored to accommodate his awkward proportions. He worked extraordinarily hard on his technique: after performances, when the other dancers went home exhausted, he often returned to the studio to practice by himself, repeating and closely studying every step or movement. He preferred to work alone and over time developed his own extreme and iconoclastic approach to dancing.
According to Bronislava, in these solitary training sessions Nijinsky took to performing the steps of a typical ballet class at an accelerated pace and with forced energy—what she later called “muscular drive.” He was less concerned with static positions and elegant poses than with speed and elasticity, tension and power. When Bronislava worked with him, as she often did, he made her dissolve the hard glue on the tips of her toe shoes with hot water so that she would develop the strength to support her own weight on pointe, thus making her movements less jerky and more languid and pliable. He himself danced high on half toe, at times almost on pointe, although the purpose was not to achieve a romantic lightness but to emphasize instead his own weight and grounding. He was after compression and intensity, movements that were at once condensed and constrained but could also unexpectedly explode. He concealed his growing strength in split-second timing: no matter how closely Bronislava looked (and she had a trained eye), she could not see his preparation for a pirouette, even when he gathered enough force to unleash a dozen turns at a time.24
Vaslav Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) with arms sensuously unfolding, legs over-crossed, and eyes downcast. Classical form gives way to movement, expression, and interiority.
All of this gave Nijinsky’s dancing a mercurial power and grace. Its mystery lay in his reworking of classical technique to shift the focus away from static images—those pretty poses—and toward movement itself. This was not a Fokinesque lyrical unfolding of limbs, but a more volcanic and unpredictable series of implosions, raw energy willfully suppressed and then released in a chain reaction of movement. Even static photographs rarely catch Nijinsky at a still point, and we see him constantly reaching, anticipating, on his way out of one pose and halfway into the next—we can almost see the trail of movement before the shutter actually closes. Other shots show him indicating a classical position without ever quite achieving it. But if there was something indeterminate and unfixed about Nijinsky’s dancing, it was never instinctive or unselfconscious. Even his most animal-like and primitive movements were the product of an intensely analytic and physical rethinking of the principles of ballet.
In 1912 Nijinsky choreographed L’après-midi d’un faune to music by Debussy after Mallarmé’s poem. The poem dated from 1865 and the music from 1894: both were dreamy, impressionistic reflections. The ballet concerned a faun who sees a nymph undressing by a stream and is aroused; the nymph flees but drops her scarf. The faun takes it, lays it across a rock, lies on top, and thrusts his hips in orgasm. The ballet was short: about eleven minutes of dancing. But although it is usually remembered for showing the great Nijinsky masturbating onstage, it was also a serious attempt to invent a new language of movement. Nijinisky began work on the ballet with Bronislava in 1910, and they practiced and experimented with steps for hours. Nijinsky was at the time obsessed with Greek art, not the Apollonian perfection of Periclesian Athens but the severe, primitive designs of the earlier Archaic period. He was also drawn to the flat, primitivist work of Gauguin: “Look at that strength,” he marveled.25
Rehearsals for the ballet were difficult: the dancers hated the movement, which was angular, two-dimensional, and frieze-like, with abrupt and taut movements requiring immense muscular discipline. They resented Nijinsky’s stringently anti-bravura style, which forced them to set aside their most flattering tricks and poses in favor of what Nijinsky himself referred to as “goat” leaps, crouches, and short, arrested steps and pivots. To make matters worse, and emphasizing the terse rigidity of the steps, the dancers performed in stiff sandals instead of ballet shoes. More offensive still, Nijinsky prohibited acting and facial expressions of any kind. “It’s all in the choreography,” he chastised one dancer who attempted to dramatize her role. Even Diaghilev was edgy and uncertain, worried that Nijinsky’s ascetic dance would alienate Parisian audiences accustomed to more lavishly colorful Russian fare.26
Faune was a dance about introversion, self-absorption, and cold physical instinct. It was not sexy but sexual—a clinical and detached depiction of desire. It was also a pointed repudiation of the sensuality and exoticism that had made Nijinsky’s own reputation as a dancer, a revolt against lusty ballets such as Schéhéra
zade and the prettily sensual Spectre de la Rose. Leaving all of that behind, Nijinsky created a reduced anti-ballet—rigorous and exacting, but stripped of the “excessive sweetness” (Nijinska) he had come to so despise.27
Then came Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). The ballet originated with Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and the Russian artist Nikolai Roerich. Roerich was a painter and archaeologist with a lifelong interest in pagan and peasant spirituality and in the Scythian—savage, rebellious, Asiatic—roots of Russian culture. He was deeply involved at Talashkino, and indeed, he and Stravinsky created the ballet’s scenario there amid the Princess Tenisheva’s vast collection of peasant arts and crafts. Drawing on the work of folklorists and musicologists, they conceived the new ballet as a ritual reenactment of an imagined pagan sacrifice of a young maiden to the god of fertility and the sun: a rite of spring. Roerich patterned the decor on Russian peasant crafts and clothing, and Stravinsky studied folk themes (“The picture of the old woman in a squirrel fur sticks in my mind. She is constantly before my eyes as I compose,” he wrote of one section). But this was not the lush orientalism of The Firebird: Roerich’s sets depicted an eerily barren and rocky landscape strewn at points with antler heads. Stravinsky’s music, with its loud, static, and dissonant chords, its driving syncopation (the score called for an expanded orchestra and large percussion section) and haunting melodies reaching into extreme registers, was similarly brutal and disorienting.28
Nijinsky admired Stravinsky and Roerich enormously and wrote to Bronislava, who originally worked with Nijinsky on the role of the sacrificial Chosen One, of Roerich’s painting The Call of the Sun: “Do you remember it Bronia?…the violet and purple colors of the vast barren landscape in the predawn darkness, as a ray of the rising sun shines on a solitary group gathered on top of a hill to greet the arrival of spring. Roerich has talked to me at length about his paintings in this series that he describes as the awakening of the spirit of primeval man. In Sacre I want to emulate this spirit of the prehistoric Slavs.” And to Stravinsky, who had conferred at length with the young choreographer about the music, he wrote that he hoped Sacre would “open new horizons” and be “all different, unexpected, and beautiful.”29
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