The house lights in San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House remain on and audience stragglers seat themselves while actors enter the stage sets behind the drawn curtains of the stage. The ballroom of a hotel in St Moritz has been recreated on stage. Stiff backed chairs line the walls with their late 19th-century woodwork. A pianist enters and sits at his instrument, women and men enter the room, elegantly dressed, chatting and laughing.
Thus opens the National Ballet of Canada’s performance of John Neumeier’s heartfelt and nostalgic tribute to the great modernist of dance, Vaslav Nijinsky. Sponsored by San Francisco Ballet and presented as their Program 6, Nijinsky is a rich montage of the historical and the fantastic, as Neumeier undertook to recreate the mind of the dancer at the moment when his madness overwhelmed him and before he disappeared from dance and into the series of psychiatric hospitals that housed him for the next thirty years.
As the opera house lights dimmed, Nijinsky, poignantly danced by Guillaume Côté, swept into the onstage ballroom, wrapped in a white kimono. From that moment on, Côté performed Nijinsky as a man apart, abstract and theatrical, isolated and despairing. He proceeded across the landing stairs and to the center of the stage, where he dropped the kimono, revealing himself in black trousers and shirt. When he began to dance his movements were angular short phrases punctuated by milliseconds of stillness. He stomped, slapped the ground, collapsed, forced his fist into his mouth. These movements, which strove for some abrupt realism, were interspersed with brisés, attitude turns and jetés. And his radical brusque movements were like shattered glass among the ballet steps’ graceful flourishes.
Suddenly the lights dimmed and took on a bluish cast, and we entered a world hovering between memory and fantasy.
The various roles identified with Nijinsky – the Spirit of the Rose (danced by Naoya Ebe), the Golden Slave (by Francesco Gabriele Frola), Harlequin from Carnaval (Naoya Ebe), the Young Man in Jeux (Skylar Campbell), and the Faun (Francesco Gabriele Frola) in L’après-midi d’un faune – appeared and disappeared in a flurry of corps de ballet dancers who flooded the stage, sometimes in illusory and Sylphide–like costumes and other times garbed in the Arabian exoticism of Scheherazade.
Almost all of the choreography that Nijinsky himself devised in his attempts to create a modernist and new form of dance is lost, only the choreography for L’après-midi d’un faune remains. Neumeier’s choreography in Nijinsky’s dream-like sections used many of the poses seen in photographs of Nijinsky: the arms folded over the head, the downward glance, the languorous curve of the back, the heavy muscularity of his legs suggesting stunning leaps and, above all, a slinky, feral and heightened eroticism. These gestures were offset – perhaps held in place – by Neumeier’s almost brainy approach to the choreography and his complex onstage structuring of the dancer’s history.