Adolf de Meyer. Photograph of Lubov Tchernicheva
and Vaslav Nijinsky in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, Paris,
1911.Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division,
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Valentine Hugo. Pastel drawing of Jeux,
undated. Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance
Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
NIJINSKY AS CHOREOGRAPHER
Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed four works. All were controversial
in their time. All retain their ability to shock in photo-documentation
and as reconstructed in performance. From photographs, one can see
the individual poses and group movements that seemed completely
divorced from even Fokine’s ballet vocabulary. The four different
designs show the range of Nijinsky’s anti-traditional thinking
and inspirations.
L’Après-midi
d’un Faune (1912), with music by Debussy and
designs by Bakst, was unexpected. Choreography by star male dancers
had traditionally been filled with virtuosity. Faune was earth-bound,
with a stylized movement vocabulary based on weight.
Jeux (1913), also
with Debussy and Bakst, was one of the first ballets to mix pedestrian
movements with ballet to present a modern-day theme. It seems
almost startlingly up-to-date in six performance photographs and
in two vivid pastels by Valentine Hugo.
Le Sacre du Printemps (1913),
to music by Stravinsky and décor by Nicholas Roerich, is
generally considered a seminal work not only in dance, but in
cultural history. Although there are few photographs of the few
performances, the near riot at the premiere is famous. The collaborators
mixed modernist with ancient Russian to create a work that shocked
in plot, movement vocabulary, harmony, rhythm and palette. See
it for yourself in the screening area. Watch the Joffrey Ballet’s
reconstruction and imagine yourself in 1913 Paris. Would you applaud?
Would you riot?
Karl Struss. Vaslav Nijinsky
in Till Eulenspiegel, New York, 1916. Roger Pryor
Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts
Till Eulenspiegel (1916)
was created for the American tour. It was a collaboration with
the young American designer/architect Robert Edmond Jones, set
to a symphonic poem by Richard Strauss. Till is a middle European
folk hero who disrupts his town until he is condemned to death,
and, like Petrouchka, defies it. Nijinsky and Jones created a
distorted medieval world of grotesque beggars and aristocratic
women dwarfed by their costumes.
