Nijinsky

Storyline

On January 19, 1919 at five o’clock in the afternoon in a ballroom of the Suvretta House Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, Vaslaw Nijinsky danced publicly for the last time. He called this performance his “Wedding with God”. My ballet Nijinsky begins with a realistic recreation of this situation. The choreography which follows, however, visualizes his thoughts, memories and hallucinations during this last performance.

Part I

Prompted by the imagined appearance of his former mentor, impresario and lover, Serge Diaghilev, Nijinsky recalls images of his sensational career with the Ballets Russes. Dancers, as aspects of his personality ant artistry, perform fragments from his most famous roles. Harlequin, the Poet from Les Sylphides, the Golden Slave from Sheherazade and the Spirit of the Rose merge and mingle with characters from his private life.

His sister Bronislava, later a choreographer, his older brother Stanislav, trained also to be a dancer – but marked from childhood by signs of madness – and his mother, the dancer Eleonora Bereda, who along with his father Thomas were the children’s first teachers, also appear in his dreamlike fantasy.

In another scene of the ballet, Nijinsky remembers his search for a new choreographic language. His experiments with movement result in his own original ballets: L’Après-midi d’un faune, Jeux, Le Sacre du printemps, and later Till Eulenspiegel.

A woman in red, Romola de Pulszky, who will later become Nijinsky’s wife, criss-crosses his confused recollections. He relives their first encounter on a ship to South America and their abrupt marriage – an event that causes the ultimate break with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.

Part II

Nijinsky’s madness drives him more and more inside himself. Memories of childhood, family, school, and the Mariinsky Theatre blend with nightmare visions of World War I – and his wife’s infidelity.

The scandalous premiere of his ballet Le Sacre du printemps appears juxtaposed with the brutality of World War I and his brother Stanislav’s death. Romola is with him through difficult and bad times.

In Nijinsky’s eyes, it is the world around him, not “Nijinsky”, that has gone mad … The Suvretta House performance and my ballet end with Nijinsky’s last dance – the War.

John Neumeier, Hamburg 2000