The Brooklyn Rail

Mostly we just talk about Vaslav Nijinsky. Oliver Herring and I walk through the exhibition Crafting the Ballet Russes at the Morgan Library. For the past couple of years, Herring has been searching for the spirit of the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889/90–1950), grasping at the remnants of a tragic and great mind from the photographs, notes, and letters that remain, summed up in his current performance project Herring as Nureyev as Nijinsky as Faun. This process is no different from what the exhibition at the Morgan library sets out to accomplish. The exhibition is very blind-men-and-the-elephant-ish in its goal. We are unable to see the Ballet Russes: dance is fundamentally ephemeral, and on top of that the company’s famed producer/director Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929) refused to allow the productions to be filmed. Crafting the Ballet Russes consists of drawings, posters, diagrams, scores, ledgers, letters, and notes used in an attempt to describe a momentous cultural shift in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. So Herring and I walk through the show, and he tells me the story of L’Après-midi d’un faune [Afternoon of a Faun], Nijinsky’s most notorious and well-attested work, illustrated by costume designs, musical scores, photographs, and even a small sculpture by Rodin.

One is greeted at the entrance to the gallery by a lilliputian recreation of Natalia Goncharova’s backdrop for the 1926 restage of the ballet L’Oiseau de feu [The Firebird], an urban miasma of onion domes, chimneys and crenellations in rust, pink and eggshell. It comes from right before the company closed shop, but in vivid, febrile fantasy, Russia is representative of the company’s output—an imaginary world of firebirds and fauns, set in a remote folkloric Slavic past, or a Grecian sylvan setting, or Middle Eastern harem. The aim was exoticism for exoticism’s sake. The rhythm of the show shifts between documentation, like the original score of Bolero, which Maurice Ravel composed for the company in 1928, and patterned frenzies of Léon Bakst’s, Alexandre Benois’s, and Natalia Goncharova’s costume and set designs. Bakst’s sketches, finished drawings, and poster for the company’s first production of The Firebird in 1910 are a mass of billowing plumed headdresses, whirling braids and richly patterned fabrics and smooth pearlescent flesh. In our walk Herring points out Igor Stravinsky’s autograph score of that ballet with a caricature of the title beast, looking more like a dodo than a phoenix, drawn by the composer himself. The Ballet Russes had its origins in a group of dancers—including Alexandre Benois, Natalia Goncharova, Léon Bakst, Bronislava Nijinska (Nijinsky’s sister), and the impresario Serge Diaghilev—who were based in St. Petersburg, and the group felt that ballet, via the libratory influences of Isadora Duncan, was the ultimate intersection of music, visual art, dance, and even literature. Diaghilev, with Bakst and Benois, cofounded a magazine, Mir iskusstva [World of Art], which was published between 1898–1904. The group then decamped to Paris in 1909, where they found a large and tempestuous audience for their outlandish dance productions grounded in composer Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) and sensory overload.

Nijinsky was around twenty-two when he created L’Après midi d’un faune. A short ballet with a score by Claude Debussy, it caused a riot in the theater in its first performance, and the police were present during the second, “it’s such a foundational piece, so singular; one of the first modernist ballets,” comments Herring. For him, the ballet is a response to the massive cultural compensation that was necessary in the face of the scientific discoveries at the start off the twentieth century: “That moment in time, everything was just opened up, there were all these new ideas, including psychoanalysis, and that opened up all these possibilities as to what is and what isn’t.” For Herring, L’Après midi d’n faune is basically Nijinsky saying “let’s examine everything again in a new way with new languages that haven’t really been invented yet.” He explains, “Nijinsky’s movement language is taken from Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan figuration on vases and frescos and so on, it aspires to flatness. What is the faun? It’s part animal, part human, the movement is so staccato; it is almost robotic as well as masturbatory: movement affected by modernity, pulling away from the classical training of the Russian ballet.” We stop in front of one of Bakst’s drawings from 1911, an illustration for Ida Rubenstein as St. Sebastian in The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, featuring a pale Rubinstein tied to a tree with serpentine green and gray cords. Herring smiles and says that the Ballet Russes was “quintessentially queer—in the contemporary sense.” The directors, designers, and choreographers of the ballet experimented with switching gender roles. Nijinsky even planned a ballet, Jeux [Games], about a threesome of men competing for each other’s affections, which was changed to two women and a man—far too ahead of its time. There is a pen-and-ink cartoon by Jean Cocteau (1961 recreation of a 1913 original) of the stately Diaghilev walking with his lover of several years, the petite Nijinsky. Diaghilev expelled the dancer from the company in 1913, when he married and had a family with Romola de Pulszky, but the dancer briefly returned after World War I had ended. Herring and I stop before Mask of God (ca. 1919), an ominous gouache and ink eye. The pupil and white of the eye stretches across the width of the page, embedded in a thick black and red border, its precise edges and perfect, even opacity indicating an obsessive technique. Nijinsky was institutionalized for schizophrenia from 1919 until his death in 1950, and while the effect he had on dance and modernism is still felt, it is clear from Crafting the Ballet Russes that the drama that the company and its participants exuded was not solely reserved for the stage.