About the production
John Neumeier’s ballet Nijinsky paints a powerful choreographic portrait of the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
Through fragmentary memories, dream sequences, and historical moments from his life, the work opens a window into his inner world. Powerful choreography, music, and symbolic imagery combine to depict both Nijinsky’s artistic genius and his struggle with mental illness.
Nijinsky
Storyline
The synopsis was written by John Neumeier.
On January 19, 1919 at five o'clock in the afternoon, Vaslav Nijinsky danced in public for the last time in the ballroom of Suvretta House in St. Moritz. He called his performance Wedding with God. My ballet Nijinsky begins with a realistic rendition of this scene. The following choreography visualizes Nijinsky's thoughts, memories and delusions during his last performance.
Evoked by the illusion of his former mentor, impresario and lover Serge Diaghilev, Nijinsky recalls images of his sensational career with the Ballets Russes. Dancers, as parts of his personality, perform fragments of his outstanding roles. Harlequin, the poet from Les Sylphides, the Golden Slave from Scheherazade and The Spirit of the Rose intermingle with characters from his own life. His sister Bronislawa, who later became a choreographer, his older brother Stanislaw - who was also trained as a dancer and was tinged with madness from childhood - and their mother Eleonora Bereda, who together with their father were their children's earliest teachers, appear in his dreamlike fantasy. In another scene of my ballet, Nijinsky recalls his uncompromising struggle for a new choreographic language. His movement experiments flow into the ballets L'Après-midi d'un faune, Jeux, Le Sacre du Printemps andlater Till Eulenspiegel. A woman in red, Romola de Pulszky, Nijinsky's later wife, thwarts his confused memories. He relives their first meeting during a voyage to South America and their sudden marriage - an event that caused the final break with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
Nijinsky's madness leads him deeper into his inner being. Memories of childhood, family, school and the Mariinsky Theater mingle with nightmarish visions of the First World War - and his wife's infidelity. The scandalous premiere of his ballet Le Sacre du Printemps is juxtaposed with the brutality of the First World War and the death of his brother Stanislaw. Romola accompanies him through difficult and bad times. In Nijinsky's eyes, it is the world that surrounds him - not "Nijinsky" who becomes mentally ill ... The performance at Suvretta House and my ballet end with Nijinsky's last dance - the war.
John Neumeier, one of the leading choreographers of our time, has long been inspired by Nijinsky – the artist and the man. He created a short ballet entitled Vaslav as early as 1979. In 2000, the 50th anniversary of Nijinsky’s death, Neumeier once again created a choreographic study of this remarkable and mysterious individual in an evening-length ballet that received its world premiere with the Hamburg Ballet: “In creating a work about a historical person, what aspect should we concentrate on? Who was he truly: The man? The artist?”, asks the choreographer.
In Neumeier’s portrait in dance, the audience learns of a life caught between glittering fame and the depths of despair: Nijinsky is the revered star of the Ballets Russes and at the same time someone plagued by madness, doubt and fear. The “biography of a soul” is made up of a wealth of memories and sensations, associations and different realities.
Nijinsky again relives the high points of his success. His most legendary roles such as Harlequin, the Spirit of the Rose and the Golden Slave appear to be mirror images and are repeatedly punctured by moments from his childhood, with members of his family and from his career – ranging from his revolutionary choreographic visions such as L’Après-midi d’un faune and Le Sacre du Printemps to the passion of meeting his wife Romola and the pain of breaking with the Ballets Russes.
However, the glory slowly begins to diminish… Past and present, theatre and war, triumph and loss merge more and more into an inner vortex. In Nijinsky’s mind, he is not the one that has descended into madness – it is the world.
In his choice of music, Neumeier remains close to the artist Nijinsky as well as to historical and musical influences. To illuminate a formative layer of his life, the first part features – alongside a few chamber music miniatures — Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. Hardly any other work embodies the magic of the early Ballets Russes more vividly. In the role of the Golden Slave, Nijinsky established his myth here even before he made dance history as the Spirit of the Rose or Petrushka. The second part of the ballet sets a deliberate contrast to this dazzling world: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 The Year 1905 recalls the brutally suppressed uprising in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Thus, between sensuality and tragedy, an arc unfolds that makes the full tension of Nijinsky’s era musically tangible.
There is an artistic kinship between John Neumeier and Vaslav Nijinsky that has itself taken on a historical character. The Russian dancer and choreographer of the early 20th century has had a decisive influence on Neumeier’s work and aesthetic. In his apartment, Neumeier maintains a private Nijinsky museum – an expression of his deep admiration for the artist, whom he regards as the greatest visionary of ballet and, at the same time, its most tragic figure.
