Dancing Genius: the Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky
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Dancing Genius This page intentionally left blank Dancing Genius The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky Hanna Järvinen The Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland © Hanna Järvinen 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–40772–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. This book is for demoss and for my late grandparents, Siiri and Eino, Eeva and Vilho, who were all born subjects of Nicholas II This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction: A Genealogy 1 Part I The Russian Invasion 1 An Audience for Ballet 27 2 Orientalism 56 Part II The Silent Body of a Genius 3 The Unique Genius 83 4 Male Beauty 121 5 Corporeality 141 6 The Mad Genius 173 Part III A Russian Russian Ballet? 7 The Old and the New Ballet 191 8 Revolutionary Exiles 219 Conclusion 242 Notes 245 Bibliography 283 Index 317 vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction: a Genealogy Nijinskymania My first encounter with Vaslav Nijinsky (Вацлавъ O~омичъ Нижинскій, 1889–1950) was one of instant and troubling familiarity, a feeling of déjà lu when reading an account of his life. Frankly, the man’s life sounded too much like a movie script to be plausible.1 All the elements of other narratives of great men seemed present, even if these contra- dicted each other. Seeking an alternative, I read other accounts and encountered denigration of Nijinsky’s off-stage person combined with laudatory accounts of his wonderful dancing. Again, the same feeling bothered me: why did this sound so familiar, so self-evident? I had encountered what Craig Dodd (1991, 6) called nijinskymania, the admiration (or rather, worship) of someone nicknamed ‘the God of the Dance’, born somewhere on the Russian steppes, sometime between 1888 and 1892, as the second son of the Polish dancers Eleonora Bereda and Thomas Nijinsky.2 Nijinsky’s fabulous Western career lasted only a dec- ade from 1909, when he became a household name as the leading male ̪ dancer in Sergei Diaghilev’s (Сергьйъ Павловичъ Дягилевъ, 1872–1929) dance troupe, the Ballets Russes, to the personal abyss of insanity in the wake of the First World War in 1919. Nijinskymania has primarily focused on Nijinsky as the star dancer of the exotic Russian troupe, and only more recently on his four controversial choreographic works for the company – L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (Games, 1913), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), and Till Eulenspiegel (1916). Consequently, this book will also primarily focus on Nijinsky as a dancer. Over the years, nijinskymania has produced (as a frustrated colleague retorted) “so much Nijinsky kitsch it makes your eyes bleed” – everything 1 2 Dancing Genius from ballets, plays and forms of fiction based on his life to postcards, paper dolls and porcelain figurines depicting him and his roles. People seem to be able to fit his image to any context, from horse racing to rock music.3 Countless stories have been told of Nijinsky – stories which are not and could never have been reality, but which within the discourse have received such truth-value that one repeatedly has to prove them false in order to present claims to the contrary. Nijinskymania is a myth in the Barthesian sense: a simplification of historical contingen- cies and contradictions, a mode of making sense of a complex set of changing circumstances (Barthes 1972, especially 11–2, 68–70, 109–59). This myth forced me to invert my original question and ask how an individual’s life has been constructed according to the rules of a movie narrative. Much of what ‘Nijinsky’ signifies today rests on the image created of him in the publicity for the Ballets Russes during his active career and shortly afterwards. Perhaps even more than his contemporary Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky became the first superstar of ballet – someone known to audiences who had never seen him dance. Even today, Nijinsky’s name carries a resonance rarely associated with a member of his pro- fession, but for reasons somewhat different from the ones that first made him famous (see Carter 2004, 14). Instead of perpetuating the myth, my interest in Nijinsky is both metahistorical and genealogical (Foucault 2001, especially 1004–24). Following Michel Foucault’s works on authorship and the operations of power, I discuss Nijinsky’s canoni- sation as a dancing genius and argue that in his figure, early twentieth- century dance aficionados found the perfect means for boosting the status of the art form. Another book would be necessary to do justice to the various later representations of Nijinsky and what they reveal of what was consid- ered of importance in dance as an art form at a given time. By the end of the Second World War, the outline of nijinskymania had fallen into place: in the creation of the tragic madman, “the idiot of genius” (Misia Sert according to Lieven 1973, 323) primary source materials contem- porary to Nijinsky’s career were overlooked in favour of reminiscences, hindsight and speculation. Having read this far, you have already been influenced by this mythical ‘afterlife’, so in what follows I have, at times, given examples of how my interpretation, based on contempo- rary materials, contradicts some of these later representations, most of which used to be hegemonic and some of which still are. I shall begin by briefly illustrating this ‘afterlife’ and the epistemologi- cal problems in addressing a career that ended abruptly in mental illness. Introduction: a Genealogy 3 After the Introduction, however, the historical individual becomes a lens for looking at how dance figured in the wider cultural discourses of the pre-war period. As a historian, I am interested in Nijinsky primarily as a means to address what kinds of insights his corporeal art form could produce for historiography. As a Foucauldian, I hope that if dance could once move, destabilise and disturb contemporary discourses, perhaps it could also do so today. As I see it, nijinskymania has prevailed and still prevails for three major reasons. First, Nijinsky’s purported mastery of movement unri- valled by his contemporaries; second, his enigmatic life outside the stage; and third, the abrupt end to his career. The first aspect is sig- nificant because Nijinsky has been lauded as the ‘World’s Best Dancer’ (sometimes with an additional ‘Ever’), even though it is quite difficult to define what combination of qualities can be termed thus, and impos- sible to ascertain whether Nijinsky possessed precisely those qualities. Nijinsky fans seem to believe anything was possible for this dancer, and have taken contemporary metaphors as actual reality. Simultaneously, much of the negative attention on Nijinsky has centred on disproving contemporary claims and reminiscences about his dance as defying the laws of nature. Later generations have voiced doubts about Nijinsky executing an entrechat-dix or a triple tour-en-l’air and/or claimed that his audiences were incapable of telling apart ten beats from six or three turns from two. It is an asset for both parties that, despite the fact that he was one of the most photographed of his contemporaries, only one pre-war photograph definitely shows Nijinsky’s famous jump and even this is somewhat blurred.4 Persistent rumours exist of a film showing Nijinsky dancing his first choreography, L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912), but in all likelihood these are untrue.5 This lack of visual sources emphasises the mystery to such an extent that one might think it intentional that Nijinsky’s leaps were never caught on film. However, it also reveals how the continuation of nijinskymania relies on the imagined readings of ‘Nijinsky’ by generations who have not seen Nijinsky dance. This begs the question of what is the purpose of (re)imagining this long-dead Russian, today? Which of our discourses need to be destabilised? As Marcia B. Citron (1995, especially 113–6, 184–7) has shown, the name of a genius (a word still frequently used of Nijinsky) allows others to bask in its reflected glory: the name of a genius signifies more than that of a regular author-figure.