God of Dance

To Vaslaz Nijinsky, the circle was the embodiment of a complete, perfect movement from which everything in life could be based.[1] The intersection of two circles form an almond-like shape,[2] and express the interdependence of opposing yet complimentary forces—life and death, heaven and earth.[3] In Nijinsky’s intimately proportioned drawings on paper with crayon and pencil, you can see these two shapes repeated over and over. The complete line that is the circle, the circular curve that is an organising principle, contain an energy that belies their scale, and they speak of Nijinsky, not solely as an artist, but as a person. All the more so because they were drawn not long before he retired from dance, between 1918 and 1919. Criss-crossing back in time, they have a dynamism, and a rhythm. So, too, John Neumeier’s “Nijinsky,” which faithfully, soulfully, like the drawings, through recurring motifs and a retracing of steps, delivers a powerful blow. As he lays bare the fragility of Nijinsky, Neumeier lays bare the same said fragility of the human condition. Into a two-hour ballet, told over two acts, Neumeier reveals Nijinsky as a dancer and choreographer, and Nijinsky as a person.

Performance

The Australian Ballet: “Nijinsky” by John Neumeier

Place

Regent Theatre, Melbourne, Australia, February 21 & 22, 2025

Words

Gracia Haby

Grace Carroll and Jake Mangakahia in “Nijinsky” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Kate Longley

“Nijinsky” was last staged by The Australian Ballet in 2016. Opening the 2025 Melbourne season, it found me retracing my own steps for this welcome return. Some nine years on, several cast members are also retracing their steps, including Callum Linnane and Jake Mangakahia in the title role.

As memories or hallucinations loop, with the intent to reveal, but in doing so ensnare, Linnane’s Nijinsky is surrounded by several performative versions of himself. Including, on the nights I attended, Marcus Morelli’s Nijinsky as the upward spring of Harlequin and a fluttering sequence of androgynous petals as Spectre of the Rose; Mangakahia’s Nijinsky as the sensual abandonment of the Golden Slave and Faun; and Brodie James’s Nijinsky as Petrushka worn asunder on the battlefield. Together they drew not just a believable image of Nijinsky on the stage, but all, in the unique ways of their character and of who they, too, are as artists, rendered, by a repeated retracing of steps understood from the inside out, a sense of ‘there he is!’ Be it the arc of the wrist or the animated bas-relief effect of the torso twisted to face the audience, while the head and lower body are shown in profile.

Callum Linnane in “Nijinsky” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Kate Longley

Non-linear in structure, Neumeier has created what he refers to as “a biography of feelings and sensations” in his arrangement of “choreographic approaches to the enormous theme” and it begins in “a moment of transition.”[4] Though we may be in the Suvretta House Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, the ballet truly begins within Nijinsky’s mind, with Linnane, as Nijinsky, fragmented, magnetic, haunted. Linnane has made the stage his canvas, just as Nijinsky, as choreographer, created an experience of totality, spanning light to dark. His Nijinsky was sublime, threatening and threatened.

Etched in my memory, Nijinsky making a star formation with his legs, whilst atop Maxim Zenin’s Serge Diaghilev’s shoulders, and the fingertip connection he sought, with open palm facing the audience. From the menace of Diaghilev’s slow clap from the sidelines, indicative of the power imbalance between the two and alluding to strings pulled, to Diaghilev pressing Nijinsky into the floor and delighting in his power over another, “Nijinsky” looks at the acrimonious split with Diaghilev, and, by turn, the Ballet Russes. With each time Nijinsky was cradled in Daghilev’s arms, something further had shifted.

Nijinsky devotee, Neumeier, has studded his ballet with details and interpretations for ballet fans and history buffs. And so, Neumeier gives us Nijinsky counting time, atop a chair, during “The Rite of Spring” (“Le Sacre du printemps”), with its nod to “primitive” Russian folk dancing, as Jill Ogai stamps her feet with growing intensity and shakes her head from side to side, her face momentarily obscured by her hair as it whips back and forth. Her hands, with splayed fingers, framing her abdomen, her arms making two triangular forms, piercing the space around her.

Grace Carroll and Callum Linnane in “Nijinsky” by John Neumeier. Photograph by Kate Longley

Elsewhere, the electrical moments within “Jeux” when Nijinsky, Benjamin Garrett’s Léonide Massine, and Diaghilev dance together; the moonlit Poet in “Les Sylphides;” the tableau vivant to create Nijinsky’s ‘stage picture’ within “Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun.” Reclining on his side with one arm braced on the ground, to form a triangle, and with one leg stretched, the other bent, these angular poses of Mangakahia and Linnane bring to life a Greek vase forced into flatness. The stillness of which echoed the subtle yet loaded stillness of Linnane’s first arrival on the stage. Held poses, and their constraint, created a sense of a body made of stone and yet not, for it is flesh and blood and madness, and in this miraculous pose, the world spins faster, reminding me that Nijinsky believed that it was not he who was mad, it was the world which was mad.

From the revelatory ‘proposal’ pas de trois with Grace Carroll’s Romola de Pulszky on the ship, where, in her eyes, in that moment, Nijinsky is the Faun,[5] to Nijinsky’s heart-wrenching pas de deux with Elijah Trevitt as his elder brother, Stanislav, the sharpness of the fragments, sliced. Hammered home by the 11th Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, with arms bent perpendicular to bodies, and stilted, jerky movements to amplify fingertips counting 1 through 10, the interior world of Nijinsky mirrors the exterior world of a world at war. And only darkness can follow.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

Herertus Gassner, ‘Der Tanz der Farben und Formen,’ in “Dance of Colours — Nijinsky’s Eye and the Abstraction” (“Tanz der Farben — Nijinsky’s Auge und die Abstraktion”), catalogue to the exhibition, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, 2009, p. 48.
Called a mandola or a vesica piscis, literally, “fish’s bladder.”
Vaslaz Nijinsky’s Untitled (Arcs and Segments: Lines), 1918–1919, crayon and pencil on paper, in the collection of John Neumeier, “Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925” exhibition, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/inventingabstraction/?work=167, accessed February 23, 2025.
“Nijinsky”, Repertory Overview, Hamburg Ballet, https://www.hamburgballett.de/en/schedule/play_repertoire.php?SNr=448, accessed February 20, 2025.
John Neumeier in interview filmed in the costume department of the Semperoper Ballet, ‘Neumeier and Nijinsky’, Dance Europe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElIBT9gdwnA&t=2s, accessed February 20, 2025.

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