“Complete, perfect movement”
Nijinsky
The Australian Ballet
Friday 21st February, 2025
Saturday 22nd February, 2025
Regent Theatre, Melbourne
Choreography, set, costumes and lighting concept: John Neumeier
Staged by Piotr Stanczyk, Leslie McBeth and Laura Cazzaniga
Music:
Frédéric Chopin, Prelude No. 20 in C minor, Op. 26
Robert Schumann, Carnival Scenes from Vienna, Op. 26, 1st movement
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, Op. 35, 1st, 3rd and 4th movements
Dmitri Shostakovich, Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147, 3rd movement and Symphony No. 11 in G minor, Op. 103
Lighting reproduced in 2025 by Ralf Merkel and Jon Buswell
Scenery and costumes courtesy of The National Ballet of Canada.
With Orchestra Victoria
The God of Dance, my response to The Australian Ballet’s Nijinsky, drawn up especially for Fjord Review.
To Vaslaz Nijinsky, the circle was as the embodiment of a “complete, perfect movement”[i] from which everything in life could be based. The intersection of two form an almond-like shape[ii], and express the interdependence of opposing yet complimentary forces — life and death, heaven and earth[iii]. 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, they 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 has infused the work with an absence of pretence to reveal Nijinsky as a dancer and choreographer, and Nijinsky as a person.
Nijinsky, in which a ballet is a fantastical vision, and drawings are like ballets, 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[iv] 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.
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”.[v] 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 Daghilev, 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.
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 (L’Après-midi d'un Faune). 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[vi], 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.
[i] 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.
[ii] Called a mandola or a vesica piscis, literally, ‘fish’s bladder’.
[iii] 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 23rd February, 2025.
[iv] Springing from Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic poem Scheherazade.
[v] “Nijinsky”, Repertory Overview, Hamburg Ballet, https://www.hamburgballett.de/en/schedule/play_repertoire.php?SNr=448, accessed 20th February, 2025.
[vi] 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 20th February, 2025.
Friday/Saturday night cast
Vaslav Nijinsky: Callum Linnane
Romola Nijinska: Grace Carroll
Bronislava Nijinska: Jill Ogai
Serge Diaghilev: Maxim Zenin
Stanislav Nijinsky: Elijah Trevitt
Tamara Kasavina/The Ballerina: Ako Kondo
Nijinsky as Harlequin/Spectre of the Rose: Marcus Morelli
Nijinsky as Golden Slave/Faun: Jake Mangakahia
Nijinsky as Petrushka: Brodie James
Léonide Massine/The New Dancer: Benjamin Garrett
Doctor: Joseph Romancewicz
Eleonora Bereda: Isobelle Dashwood
Nijinsky opens in Sydney/Warrang on the 4th of April, 2025
Image credit: The Australian Ballet’s Callum Linnane as Vaslav Nijinsky and Grace Carroll as Romola Nijinska in John Neumeier’s Nijinsky by Kate Longley
