"Biography of the Soul"

“On January 19, 1919, at five o’clock in the afternoon, Vaslav Nijinsky danced in public for the last time in the ballroom of the Suvretta House Hotel in St. Moritz. He called this performance his ‘wedding to God’ (…),” writes John Neumeier in the synopsis for his ballet Nijinsky, which begins with that pivotal moment in the career of the dancer of the century and serves as the framing narrative for Neumeier’s creation, a “biography of the soul.” He adds: “The subsequent choreography, however, brings his thoughts, memories, and hallucinations during this final performance.” Flashbacks—whether imagined or real—to a fascinating yet tragic life, which consisted of “ten years of growing up, ten years of learning, ten years of dancing, and thirty years of darkness” (Richard Buckle).

Vaslav Nijinsky, born in 1889, was one of the leading dancers of the Ballets Russes, founded by Serge Diaghilev, a company which, since its founding in 1909, had de­vel­oped into one of the most in­flu­ential bal­let companies and regard­ed its dance cre­a­tions as true works of total art. Diaghilev’s vision, to conceive of the art of ballet as a meeting place for various arts—movement, music, design— gave rise to new ways of seeing and thinking about this art form and made the performances of the Ballets Russes a sensation.

Nijinsky quickly became the star of the troupe during its first guest performance in Paris: It was not only his extraordinary technical brilliance and virtuosity, but above all his intense and at the same time sensual presence impressed the audience. He was called the “dieu de la danse” (god of dance), a nickname that came to define him and also allowed the male dancer’s image —sometimes androgynous, sometimes erotic—in a new light.

Soon, Nijinsky also turned his hand to choreography. Scandal and revolution went hand in hand in his choreographic work with pieces such as L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) and Le Sacre du printemps, set to Igor Stravinsky’s composition of the same name (1913).

In the year of the legendary premiere of The Rite of Spring, Nijinsky met Romola de Pulzky on a boat trip; and the two were mar­ried in Buenos Aires during a South American tour of the Ballets Russes, which took place without Diaghilev. A fateful decision that led to a rift with Diaghilev, who was not only Nijinsky’s director and patron but also his lover.

During World War I, Nijinsky retreated to Switzerland in 1917. Two years later, he was diagnosed with a severe, incurable mental illness that forced him to end his career. Thus, the artist spent the last thirty years of his life under the care of his wife Romola and his relatives, as well as in variousinstitutions. He died in 1950 near London.

Nijinsky’s extraordinary artistic work, as well as his personal fate, have always fascinated Neumeier. As a young man in his hometown of Milwaukee, the choreographer discovered a book about Vaslav Nijinsky in a library. Through this work, Nijinsky became more than just a legendary figure on stage for Neumeier. He became a person with a family, emotions, and very personal challenges.

Over the course of decades, Neumeier collected books, documents, and mementos related to Nijinsky, building one of the world’s most significant collections. After choreographing a short ballet titled Vaslaw in 1979, he followed it in 2000—the 50th anniversary of Nijinsky’s death, came that full-length evening work, which ranks among Neumeier’s most important works. Premiered with the Hamburg Ballet—the company of which he was director for 50 years— Nijinsky is not a “typical” narrative ballet, but rather the creation of a “landscape of Nijinsky’s soul”: A danced space of remembrance composed of memories, fears, dreams, and both internal and external conflicts.

And so, building on that last public dance—brilliant and unsettling at the same time— “Now I will dance the war for you, with its suffering, its destruction, its death. The war that you failed to prevent, for which you are therefore partly responsible”— —a dance portrait set to a musical collage compiled by Neumeier featuring works by Frédéric Chopin, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Robert Schumann.

Through a tapestry of memories and emotions, the audience is transported to the glamorous, innovative, and artistically free era of the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky’s most famous roles, such as the Golden Slave in Scheherazade, the Spirit of the Rose in Le Spectre de la Rose, or the Faun in L’Après-midi d’un Faune, whose reflections are pierced by moments and people from his childhood, as well as by his two significant relationships with Romola and Diaghilev. As the ballet pro­gre­s­ses, the past and the present become more and more in­tertwined, stage life and the reality of war, success, loss, and despair. In Nijinsky’s perception, it is not he who has succumbed to madness, but the world, which had been thrown into disarray by World War I. Plunging ever deeper into the inner maelstrom, Neumeier creates, together with Nijinsky, a powerful homage to this extraordinaryartist—a choreographic approach that makes no attempt to explain him.