Vaslav Nijinsky

“ He has appeared in nine rôles in New York during the two short seasons in which he has been seen with the Russian Ballet here: the Slave in Scheherazade, Petrouchka, the Rose Ghost, the Faun, the Harlequin in Carneval, Narcisse, Till Eulenspiegel, and the principal male rôles of La Princesse Enchantée and Les Sylphides. To enjoy the art of Nijinsky completely, to fully appreciate his genius, it is necessary not only to see him in a variety of parts, but also to see him in the same rôle many times. ”

“ It is more objective in feeling than the scene of any other of the Russian ballets—less a dream than a vision, so that when it comes to an end we feel that it is ourselves that are losing touch with reality rather than that what appeared as reality is now proving itself an illusion.
The secret of this effect is twofold. Partly it lies in the exquisite purity of convention which the ballet retains throughout, partly in the conviction of aloofness which Nijinsky brings to his rendering of the part of Armide's slave. ”

“ As a ballet Les Sylphides is perfectly simple, perfectly refined. The long, deep-waisted skirts of the dancers are substantially the same as those worn in the middle of the last century by Grisi, Fanny Elssler, or Taglioni. And there is nothing esoteric in the dancing; only the genius of a pure tradition, perfected and conserved. Nijinsky, of course, in his rich, black surcoat, stands out very prominent among the white ranks of the sylphides whom it is his happy task to shepherd. His dancing, too, is as completely true to the orthodox tradition as is theirs, and as spiritual. ”

“ The result was, of course, that I received official intimation that our line could apparently be broken at any time and that "steps must be taken," etc., etc. I took steps in the direction of Nijinsky.
Nijinsky is a Polish Jew (from Commercial Road, E.) and has long been the despair of his platoon sergeant. He is fat where there is no need to be fat, his clothes bulge where no clothes are expected to bulge, and he is the kind of man who loses a cap-badge once a week, preferably just before the C.O. comes round. There is only one saving grace about him. ”

“ But the perfection of Nijinsky’s technical skill, extraordinary as this is, provides but the lesser reason for his triumph. He is an artist as well as a wonderful dancer. He appeals not only to the eye but to the imagination. Conceivably there might be found another dancer with equal command of movement, and another mime with equal subtlety of pose and gesture: but one who can so weld into a single faculty of expression the twin arts of pantomime and the dance is surely far to seek. ”

“ Such is the course of training which in recent years has produced more than one dancing star of the first magnitude—a training whose principles are bound up with a tradition of art unequalled for strength and self-consistency. Never, indeed, has genius been more happy in its education than Nijinsky's. Never has it come upon the scene at a moment more opportune for its fruition. Only the very briefest résumé of the history of the ballet in Russia will be enough to make this clear. ”

“ On the stage, Nijinsky makes of himself what he will. He can look tall or short, magnificent or ugly, fascinating or repulsive. Like so many interpretative artists, he remoulds himself for his public appearances. It is under the electric light in front of the painted canvas that he becomes a personality, and that personality is governed only by the scenario of the ballet he is representing. ”

“ Having seen Nijinsky, I could not agree with him—and this indifferent observer became that evening himself a fervent disciple of the Ballet. For Nijinsky gave him, he found, just what his ideal performance of Shakespeare's play might have given him, a basis for dreams, for thinking, for poetry. The ennobling effect of all great and perfect art, after the primary emotion, seems to be to set our minds wandering in a thousand channels, to suggest new outlets. ”

“ It was not the part of reason, for example, to pitchfork on the Century stage an indifferent performance of Le Pavilion d'Armide, in which Nijinsky once disported himself as the favourite slave, and which, as a matter of fact, requires a company of virtuosi to make it a passable diversion. Cléopâtre, in its original form with Nijinsky, Fokine, Pavlowa, Ida Rubinstein, and others, hit all who saw it square between the eyes. ”

“ His dancing has the unbroken quality of music, the balance of great painting, the meaning of fine literature, and the emotion inherent in all these arts. There is something of transmutation in his performances; he becomes an alembic, transforming movement into a finely wrought and beautiful work of art. The dancing of Nijinsky is first an imaginative triumph, and the spectator, perhaps, should not be interested in further dissection of it, but a more intimate observer must realize that behind this the effect produced depends on his supreme command of his muscles. ”

“ Rather is it an instance of a widespread tendency which has been manifest of late in almost every department of art—a tendency of reaction against the complex achievement of a self-conscious age. For without implying that Nijinsky's art is derived in any essential respect from Post-Impressionism, it is yet not irrelevant to record the fact of Nijinsky's ardent admiration for the work of Paul Gauguin, or to mention the undoubted influence of the same master upon the style of stage-setting adopted in Jeux and Le Sacre du Printemps. ”

“ In this dream-ballet Nijinsky is a being of amazing agility and grace. He is as light upon the air as a rose petal. He contrives to bring into his dancing something of the gentleness of the moonlit night and the fragrance of the dawn. He shows himself as capable of delicate and almost womanly motion as he is of masculine vivacity and vigour. And when he floats out through the open window back to his rose-garden, he almost persuades one for the moment that he has discovered the secret of human flight.
In Les Sylphides the producers have been daring enough to{144} forget to be modern. ”

“ Expressed in terms of pantomime it might easily have seemed little more than a thing of merely fascinating commonplace, like a scene out of some musical comedy played in dumb show. But here Nijinsky comes in, and raises it all to a higher power of meaning by the sincerity of his purpose and by his use of a convention which so combines a sense of character with an austere impersonality of action, that it can turn a particular piece of fact or fancy into an instance of universal truth. For Jeux is something more than a scene of charming dalliance between a young man and two young girls. ”

“ Dancing, such people say, is of the essence of freedom. To restrain is to sterilise and to reduce the living body of man to nothing better than a mechanism of springs and steel. Well, there is this amount of truth in such a criticism: that Nijinsky's method does not actually seem so nicely adapted to express certain moods of natural abandonment as, say, Mordkin expressed in that famous Bacchanale he danced with Anna Pavlova. Still, no artist is at his best in every mood, and to expect him to be so is to deny to him the gift of personality. ”

“ Dancing with him is an expression of mood, not of mere grace or rhythm. Even in the purely graceful ballets like Les Sylphides or Le Pavilion d'Armide, he shows us a mind at work creating gracefulness rather than a mere body being graceful. It is difficult enough to analyse, but one feels that all this splendid and apparently inspired resourcefulness must be bound up, somehow, with Nijinsky's own personal attitude towards life itself.
A man, of course, may be an excellent dancer, and at the same time only very moderate in his interest in or understanding of life as a whole. ”

“ Indeed, precision is a quality we see exposed so seldom in the theatre that when we find it we are almost inclined to hail it as genius. The rôle of the Slave in this ballet is perhaps Nijinsky's scenic masterpiece—exotic eroticism expressed in so high a key that its very existence seems incredible on our puritanic stage, and yet with such great art (the artist always expresses himself with beauty) that the intention is softened by the execution. Before the arrival of this dancer, Scheherazade had become a police court scandal. ”

“ He never forgets for a moment where and what he is, and though, as we have hinted, Armide is first and foremost a choreographic ballet, Nijinsky has also made of it a splendid occasion for the practice of his faculty for imaginative characterisation.
This, I think, explains the fact that one can return to the Pavillon d Armide time after time, and with a sense of never-failing refreshment. For the art of Nijinsky has made one free of a strange country, where dancing and simple melodies of music are the natural language of the soul, the perfect expression of an essential and peculiar joy. ”

“ Waslaw Nijinsky is a native of Warsaw. He was born some twenty-three years ago, the son of parents who were both closely connected with the branch of the Russian Imperial Ballet established in that city. His mother was a dancer. Likewise his father, who was early promoted to the rank of ballet-master, and took an honourable part in the development of a national school of dancing as opposed to the Italian school whose influence in Warsaw had previously been supreme. ”

“ There are many young men in the Russian ballet who dance excellently with their bodies, even if they cannot leap as high as Nijinsky, but what really separates him from them is the fact that he dances not only with his body, but with his soul. Unfortunately this expression is often used lightly to mean merely "with enthusiasm." But it can be used in a graver sense, and it is in that sense that I use it.
Original
Nijinsky Always a Dancer SO free and yet so disciplined!" ”

“ He was, I happen to know, largely responsible in influencing Pavlova temporarily to postpone the idea of a company of her own and to abandon their own tour, because he believed the future of Russian Ballet lay with Diaghileff. Although the Nijinsky legend commences when Nijinsky first leapt through the window of the virginal bedroom of Le Spectre de la Rose, in Paris in 1911, it was Prince Igor and Bolm’s virile, barbaric warrior chieftain that provided the greater impact and produced the outstanding revelation of male dancing such as the Western World had not hitherto known. ”

“ Whatever his role, the young Russian dancer projects an interior emotion which has in it all the force of spontaneity, but is at the same time conscious and considered. As an actress, that has always been my ideal of expression. But actors express emotions; it is generally their duty to realise, in fact, to recall a man. Nijinsky never recalls human experience, never suggests the passions of mankind. He is always the dancer. Now the miming of ordinary ballet-dancers has often in the past seemed to be more than a little ridiculous. ”

“ There are features in this ballet which one could spare not less gladly than the miraculous flower in “Narcisse.”
Certainly “Le Dieu Bleu” has many beauties. It shows us, in a multiplicity of radiant dresses massed against a background of daring colour and design, a rich vein in the decorative art of Léon Bakst. It shows us Karsavina in a part that gives full play to the fierce and passionate quality in her miming. But chiefly it is an excuse for the preciosity of Nijinsky. There is something more than the mere accomplished dancer in that remarkable personality. ”

“ But the case of Nijinsky is more tragic because abstinence from skating and riding, of which he was passionately fond, entails greater anguish on so sensitively organised a temperament than it would on a mere man of action, and the suffering of a great artist may lead to international complications which it is terrible to complicate. Russian dancing is as necessary to the well-being of our social system as standard bread, yet when we think of the sacrifices which its hierophants undergo in order to minister to our pleasure the sturdiest Hedonist cannot escape misgivings. ”

“ It needs no little exercise of the imagination to form a mental picture of Lord Haldane as a member of the Russian ballet, or, to put it in a more concrete form, making the famous flying exit in Le Spectre da la Rose. Could fancy be translated into fact, the drawing power of such a spectacle would be prodigious. On the other hand, and in view of the notorious adaptability of the Slavonic temperament, we can well imagine Nijinsky proving an admirable Lord Chancellor. ”

“ This is true, certainly, of the art of every dancer, but in the present case especially so; if only because Nijinsky has chosen to throw in his lot with that movement in the modern theatre which is antagonistic to anything like an undue emphasis on the talent of the individual.
That the whole is greater than the part is a hard precept for mime or dancer who happens to be blessed with personality. The temptation to dominate is strong. ”

“ After a summer in Spain and Switzerland, without Nijinsky, the Russian Ballet returned to America for a second season, opening at the Manhattan Opera House October 16, 1916. It is always a delight to hear and see performances in this theatre, and it was found that the brilliance of the Ballet was much enhanced by its new frame. The season, however, opened with a disappointment. It had been announced that Nijinsky would dance on the first night his choregraphic version of Richard Strauss's tone-poem, Till Eulenspiegel. It is not the first time that a press agent has made a false prophecy. ”