The Three Graces and Disgraces of Jeux In the spring of 1912 Vaslav Nijinsky achieved notoriety as a choreographer that equalled the fame he had won over five triumphant years as a dancer. His creation of L’Après-midi d’un Faune, set to an already existing Debussy score, caused a scandal in Paris that escalated from theatrical incident to national political debate. (1) The attraction between faun and nymph was a legacy from ancient Greece, but Nijinsky’s ballet went beyond the bounds of convention; dancing as the beast he made a fetish of the Nymph’s scarf to reach apparent orgasm in front of the audience. What happens on a vase in a museum is one thing—what is shown in the flesh on stage is another. Argument raged in the French press after L’Après-midi d’un Faune. Encouraged by Diaghilev, the sculptor Auguste Rodin brought the weight of his great reputation to Nijinsky’s defence in a letter to Le Matin. Its rival Le Figaro immediately republished Rodin’s letter as grounds for further attack, leading to a threatened police ban on Faune and a huge box office success. (2) Diaghilev was quick to garner these energies for Nijinsky’s next project, commissioning a new score from Debussy for another ballet to test sexual taboos. Jeux was thus launched in the early summer of 1912. The laconic choreography of Faune––all sculptural poses and internalized tensions––had surprised Paris, which lionized Nijinsky as a virtuoso. What had shocked the audience most about his first choreography, however, was not the reductive style but the transgressive approach to stage action. The disgraces of Jeux would take ballet a great deal further in that direction, introducing to dance theatre the subjects of homosexuality and a mixed gender ménage à trois. Surprisingly, the exposure of such material in Jeux seemed to cause less protest than the extreme angles of Nijinsky’s style. When the English saw the ballet a month or so after the French, they, too, were startled by the choreography. One London critic claimed the dancers were “suffering from ‘tennis wrist’ all over” and another said he “longed to be able to unbuckle the limbs of the dancers and set them free from the rigid ties by which they were bound.” (3) Instead of complaints about Nijinsky’s suggestive entanglements with the two ballerinas in Jeux, the choreographer was accused of endangering their limbs with his contortions. So within a year of Faune the situation had reversed, and the disgrace of his new ballet was less the sexual mores of the movement than the movement itself. Jeux used, and according to some, abused classical steps, but the arch-classicist André Levinson recognized that its “geometric schematization” was a renovation of ballet priniciples. (4) Perhaps because Jeux seemed closer to ballet as it was then known, the distortions of Nijinsky’s style appeared all the more radical. Jeux is arguably the most modern of the choreographer’s works, at once the most personal and most abstract. Nijinska declared it the beginning of neoclassicism in ballet and the source of her own experiments in this mode. (5) If partnership is the fundamental end and means of classical dance, a universal good that overcomes all kinds of vicissitudes, then the love triangle is a deadly threat––one of ballets tried and true plots. (6) Not least among the remarkable achievements of Jeux is how Nijinsky totally transformed this cliché. Games of love through the metaphor of sport was a novel conception that Nijinsky proposed, but who was to play the games had to be negotiated with Diaghilev. Some five years after the premiere Nijinsky wrote in his Diary that Diaghilev wanted Jeux to be about a young man with two male lovers. But this relationship was judged to be a taboo too far and the absence of female dancers a test too great for ballet-goers. Regarding the male trio, Nijinsky avows in the Diary that he “camouflaged these personalities on purpose,” suggesting the change to two women and a man was his decision. (7) Nijinsky himself had originally imagined a large cast, a host of youths moving in and out of configurations: “There should be no corps de ballet, no ensembles, no variations, no pas de deux, only boys and girls in flannels, and rhythmic movements” while “a group at a certain stage was to depict a fountain.” (8) Ultimately, the ballet was danced just by Nijinsky and two ballerinas, redefining what could be shown in public among a dancing threesome. In Jeux Nijinsky used the duet not as a set piece but as a psychological lever to prompt reactions from the unpartnered third person. Each member of the trio in turn is the odd person out. But in the end, by changes in awareness constructed through movement, the three become one. Nijinsky transformed the potentially banal idea of a three-way affair into an understated thriller about emotional mutuality. This sophisticated idea prompted his new dance vocabulary, a synthesis of visual influences which the present essay explores. Defined by Disgrace Disgrace quickly became the defining characteristic of Nijinsky’s work, a label that loomed ever larger from Faune and Jeux to Le Sacre du Printemps. Diaghilev as a publicist made the name of Nijinsky synonymous with scandal. What was good for Ballets Russes publicity, however, was not necessarily good for the young choreographer’s sense of himself. The guilt and despair of the Diary provide some measure of the eventual cost. When Diaghilev brought his company to Paris in 1909, the myth of the modern artist already embraced the role of rule breaker. Nijinsky’s natural inclination as a choreographer was to revamp the art form at which he so excelled, and, in terms of dance tradition, he played the iconoclast with ease. His works show that he regarded the body as the fundamental subject of dance. Also he realized that eroticism needed a more modern approach than he had encountered in the standard repertoire. Even the ballets by Mikhail Fokine, with their stellar roles for Nijinsky, conflated the erotic with the exotic. Nijinsky took the opposite tack––bluntness, simplicity and familiarity of reference instead of far-flung fantasy. The body becomes the locus of experience. Nijinsky’s choreography features the body in extreme states––passion, ecstasy, fear––states when the body can go out of control. What makes his dances so compelling is the highly controlled way he presents these states, a kind of kinaesthetic brinkmanship. Sex per se was made the selling point of his work through marketing and manipulation of the press. Overnight, with the premiere of Faune, Nijinsky became known as a breaker of rules about sexual morality, an anarchistic force that threatened codes of decency in body language. But the tactic backfired, partly because sensationalism did not equip promoters or the public to value Nijinsky’s profound innovations. By the end of the season in which Jeux and Le Sacre changed the course of dance history, theatre managers were refusing to book the young choreographer’s work. Scandal could not be trusted to sustain box office profit. (9) So, as the Jeux saga began in the summer of 1912, despite the acclaim Nijinsky had earned for some twenty dancing roles with the Ballets Russes, he was identified with his singular choreographic effort. Dubbed in print as the “Debussyian dancer,” he was now linked in the public mind not only with France’s master composer but also its master sculptor, whose statues modernized erotic subjects through formal abstraction of explicit movement. Diaghilev chose this moment for Rodin to sculpt Nijinsky. For him to do so just as the twenty-three year old star began his new Debussy ballet was surely meant to maximize the celebrity of Faune. But this sculptural adventure, so vital to the genesis of Jeux, remains historically ambiguous. Not even the chronology is clear. Romola Nijinsky, whom the dancer married in the complex aftermath of Jeux and Le Sacre, claimed later in her biography that the sittings with Rodin had happened at the end of July 1912. (10) Jacques-Emile Blanche, the writer and artist who translated Nijinsky’s Jeux scenario into French for Debussy that summer, concurs on chronology with Romola. (11) But their time frame is impossible as Nijinsky was in London all of July. Nevertheless, during the high summer he did call on Blanche at his home in Meudon, near Rodin’s studio. So the visits to Blanche and Rodin probably date from early August when Diaghilev and Nijinsky were definitely in Paris to discuss Jeux with Debussy, stopping en route to Deauville where the Ballets Russes had a short season before their holiday. Bronislava Nijinska wrote in her memoirs that her brother expected “to be in Paris in September to hear Claude Debussy’s music for his new ballet, Jeux, and while in Paris he would also be posing for Rodin.” (12) But she explains that instead Nijinsky went directly from his holiday in Venice with Diaghilev to meet her in Monte Carlo for rehearsals of Jeux. Nijinsky probably began the sessions with Rodin immediately after Faune, in early June 1912, before the Ballets Russes left France, and then resumed work with him in early August on the way to Deauville. In telling the tale Romola Nijinsky makes much of the heat wave that plagued Paris at the time of the Rodin incident, which lends support to the August dating. As the story goes, Diaghilev arrived undetected during a sitting to find the sculptor and dancer asleep after lunch, reclining in close proximity; his jealousy inflamed, the impresario departed unnoticed, coming to his own conclusions and resolving to halt the project, which he promptly did.