Nijinsky Synopsis
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HARRIS THEATER
On January 19, 1919 at five o’clock in the afternoon in a ballroom of the
Suvretta House Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, Vaslav Nijinsky danced
publicly for the last time. He called this performance his “Wedding with
God.” My ballet
Nijinsky
begins with a realistic recreation of this situa-
tion. The choreography which follows, however, visualizes his thoughts,
memories and hallucinations during this last performance.
PART I
Prompted by the imagined appearance of his former mentor, impresa-
rio and lover, Sergei Diaghilev, Nijinsky recalls images of his sensational
career with the Ballets Russes. Dancers, as aspects of his personality,
perform fragments from his most famous roles. Harlequin, the Poet in
“
Les Sylphides,” the Golden Slave in “Scheherazade” and the Spectre de
la Rose merge and mingle with characters from his private life.
His sister Bronislava, later a choreographer, his older brother Stan-
islav, trained also to be a dancer, but marked from childhood by signs of
madness, and his mother, the dancer Eleonora Bereda, who along with
his father Thomas were the children’s first teachers, also appear in his
dreamlike fantasy.
In another scene of the ballet, Nijinsky remembers his search for a new
choreographic language. His experiments with movement result in his
own original ballets “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” “Jeux,” “Le Sacre du prin-
temps” and later “Till Eulenspiegel.”
A woman in red, Romola de Pulszky who will later become Nijinsky’s wife,
crisscrosses his confused recollections. He relives their first encounter
on a ship to South America and their abrupt marriage, an event causing
the ultimate break with Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes.
PART II
Nijinsky’s madness drives him more and more inside himself. Memories of
childhood, family, school, and the Mariinsky Theatre blend with nightmare
visions of World War I, and his wife’s infidelity.
The scandalous premiere of his ballet “Le Sacre du Printemps” appears
juxtaposed with the brutality of World War I and his brother Stanislav’s
death. Romola is with him through difficult and bad times.
In Nijinsky’s eyes, it is the world around him, not Nijinsky that has gone
mad…
The Suvretta House performance and my ballet end with Nijinsky’s last
dance, the War.
John Neumeier, Hamburg 2000
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SYNOPSIS
