Nijinsky misrepresented

Wandering into the National Gallery of Victoria recently to see the exhibition Queer, I came upon on a small bronze of a man, tilted back, joyfully flinging out both his arms, named “Nijinsky”. This was a little-known depiction of the famous dancer, who is more commonly portrayed in his roles as either the Faun in his own ballet, L’Apres-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), or as the sad clown in Mikhail Fokine’s ballet, Petrouchka.

The aim of Queer was to showcase items from the NGV’s collections through a queer lens. It is an interesting approach and was an important exhibition.

Panels adjacent to the exhibits give some historical context and provenance. Curiously, the Nijinsky bronze panel neither gave any information of its maker, John Robinson, nor its collector, Kenneth Begg, former trustee of NGV. Rather, the panel not only stated some strange untruths, it focused on the closing moments of L’Apres-midi d’un faune:

As principal of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, he [Nijinsky] performed his own choreography to Claude Debussy’s composition L’Apres-midi d’un faune (1912). The ballet ended with Nijinsky as the faun in a skin-tight costume, miming masturbation into a wisp of fabric.

“Miming masturbation”? I had heard of this idea before, but I had always thought it to be more legend than fact. Did the NGV curators have more solid evidence for this interpretation of Nijinsky’s choreography? Or were they repeating innuendo, using it to present Nijinsky as queer?

I ask these questions out of a personal connection and investment in Nijinsky’s work. I was one of the group of six “Nymphs” in the 1967 restaging of L’Apres-midi d’un faune by London’s Ballet Rambert. My then 24-year-old husband, Jonathan (“Jack”) Taylor (1940-2019), danced the Faun. The Company’s founder-director, Madame Marie Rambert (1888 – 1982) – whom we called “Mim” - taught us the work.

Rambert knew Nijinsky personally and was familiar with the original staging of his work. Her 1967 revival had been previously assisted by Leon Woizikowsky (1899 – 1975) who had himself danced the Faun in 1930. Leon also taught Jonathan Taylor as a student and told him about Nijinsky’s incredible ability to jump; his magnetic stage presence; and how he completely transitioned, trance-like, into whatever role he danced.

The “wisp of cloth” moment occurs after the Nymphs, fleeing from the spying Faun, drop a scarf. The half-boy and half-goat Faun picks up the dropped material. He holds and feels it, transfixed by it. Finally, he gently and carefully lays the cloth over a rock-like platform at the back of the stage, and brings himself closer, lowering himself onto it, and then, abruptly, the curtain drops.

“No, no! Jack, not sexual!” the passionate voice of Mim called out to my husband in rehearsal. “He doesn’t know, he is innocent, a young animal, not a man.”

What made that last moment powerful was that the dancer interprets the Faun with the naivety of a child and animal. The sexual connotation came through the eye of the beholder, the adult audience.

Mim understood L’Apres-midi d’un faune to be a work of genius. It broke new choreographic ground to be the first contemporary ballet of its kind. She spoke to us of the technical precision Nijinsky demanded of his dancers and, importantly, she explained that Nijinsky’s innocence as the Faun was drawn from his memory of his own adolescence.

This knowledge stemmed from Mim Rambert’s deep admiration and close knowledge of Vaslav Nijinsky. She had worked intensely with him, including helping him count the complex music by Igor Stravinsky for The Rite of Spring’s premiere in 1913. In fact, as a young dancer, Mim had been deeply in love with Nijinsky, unbeknownst to him. But then, so many who saw him dance fell in love with him.

Joan Acocella writes in her introduction to The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky that the young dancer was a “sex symbol”:

…onstage he could look like sex itself in roles specially created for him. As the Golden Slave in Scheherazade by Fokine he became the subject of “fantastic fables”, that he had girdles of emeralds and diamonds given to him by an Indian prince. During performances, people snuck into his dressing room and stole his underwear.

This sexualised adoration and treatment of Nijinsky was at odds with his own identity and sexual (in)experience. Acocella writes that “off stage [Nijinsky] was shy and naïve”. Her research shows that Nijinsky’s naivety was reflected in the ways his life and career was controlled and directed by older and more powerful men and women. When he joined the Imperial St Petersburg Ballet company aged eighteen, Nijinsky was promoted immediately above the usual corps de ballet entry level to coryphée status because one of the company’s principal ballerinas requested him as her dance partner. 

Control over Nijinsky’s life went beyond his dancing. As Acocella explains: “In those days in Russia there was a heavy sexual trade in ballet dancers. Some dancers accepted fees from interested ballet patrons for making the introductions”.

One such company dancer introduced the then 18-year-old Nijinsky to 30-year-old Prince Paval Lvov. This was probably Nijinsky’s first sexual relationship, supposes Acocella. Nijinsky was “traded”, or effectively “pimped”, and at his mother’s approval.

In fact, his mother discouraged Nijinsky’s heterosexual interests because “she felt that marriage would impede his career”, as Acocella puts it. Rather, she was “proud to see her son with so fine a figure as Prince Lvov and was grateful for Lvov’s financial help.”

When Lvov tired of Nijinsky less than a year later, he introduced him to Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, the famous director and impresario then aged thirty-five.

Nijinsky later wrote in his diary: “Prince Lvov forced me to be unfaithful to him with Diaghilev because he thought that Diaghilev would be useful to me. I was introduced to Diaghilev by telephone”. As Acocella puts it: “Nijinsky went around to the hotel where Diaghilev was staying and was bedded and presumably hired, the same day”.

Nijinsky’s diaries not only raise serious questions about his lack of consent or control in his relationships with Lvov and Diaghilev, but as to how he identified sexually. He writes of his disgust of Diaghilev’s black hair on the pillow and of his fear of the man.

Diaghilev wielded incredible control over Nijinsky’s career. He placed him centre stage in Ballet Russes and Nijinsky subsequently, transformed the previously ubiquitous role of the male dancer into celebrity status. Before Ballet Russes, toured Europe, male ballet dancers did little more than partner ballerinas; held and lifted them, and made them look light and magical. But Nijinsky, with his exotic, Tatar-like face, his forceful on-stage presence and brilliant technique, became for audiences an astonishing event. He was, more than any work or any other dancer, Diaghilev’s ticket to success and he promoted Nijinsky across Europe like a pop sensation.

When Marie Rambert, as a young woman, travelled by ship with the Ballet Russes to South America, Nijinsky took advantage of Diaghilev’s absence (the director had a fear of sea travel) to propose marriage to Ballet Russes “groupie”, Romola de Pulski, whom he had met less than two weeks earlier. Rambert always hoped Nijinsky proposed only to be free of Diaghilev. And he soon was, as Diaghilev immediately fired him, the famous dancer as married man, did not fit Diaghilev’s scheme of things.

Why did Nijinsky marry so suddenly? Was it to escape Diaghilev’s control? Was it an indication that he was indeed heterosexual?

He wrote in his diary how he used to dream of women, but perhaps because of his life with controlling men, he felt conflicted by these heterosexual urges. He even found his own masturbation to be abhorrent. If he was exploring these feelings in L’Apres-midi d’un faune with a cloth (notably that left by the off-stage female nymph) then was he, as the Queer exhibition seems to suggest, exploring or celebrating his queerness? It would seem to suggest the very opposite.

I posed this question, with all that you’ve read to this point, to the Queer exhibition curators. They very generously responded with all their research information that had informed the panel text that accompanied the bronze.

It then became for me a fascinating journey through the past to trace step by step these snippets of mostly cultural shock and gossip that have informed the history around Nijinsky that exists up to now. Included were a studio photograph suggesting proof of a first night performance, a recollection by Mikhail Fokine’s shock reaction while watching secretly a dress rehearsal of Faun from the darkened auditorium and the front page review in the Figaro, the morning after the premiere of Faun, capturing the Paris audience outrage.

None of the NGV research information was for me definite proof that Nijinsky intended to portray masturbation. The sheer newness and controversial nature of the choreography created shock and anger in the opera ballet audience of 1912, and accounts of the performance are therefore more contradictory than is usually the case. Moreover, even if we were to accept that the scene did take place, why is this taken by the curators as some sort of validation that Nijinsky is queer?

Was he queer? Did he aim for his choreography to be a brave new expression of sexual freedom?

The NGV curatorial team wrote to me that their panel accompanying the Nijinsky bronze aimed to reflect what recent writers on this subject had commended in Nijinsky’s “ground-breaking” choreography of miming masturbation.

This is what Ann Whitley, who notated the first version of L’Apres-midi d’une faune, Ballet Rambert performed in 1967, wrote:

I wonder if anyone at the National Gallery Victoria has read a movement score of Faune. If they knew the choreography, they’d know that in the last bars of the choreography, the Faun lets himself down into a prone position on the veil and slides his hands, NOT down his front to the crutch, but either side of his body, just the fingertips skimming the rock beneath. The final thrust into the ground could be considered orgasmic or simply an innocent exhalation of breath onto the clothing of a woman.

In his diary, Nijinsky writes about the creation of Faun: “Debussy, the famous musical composer insisted on having the story on paper. I asked Diaghilev to help me and he and Bakst (set and costume designer) together wrote down my story on paper. I know that Diaghilev likes saying they are his because he likes praise, ….this ballet was composed by me under the influence of my life with Diaghilev. The Faun is me…”

So, last July 2022, when I stood again before that authoritative notice in the NGV adjacent the bronze statue of Vaslav Nijinsky, knowing all of the above, I felt a hopeless anger.

As a former dancer who was married to male dancer, and now a grandmother of a young male dance student, I know the all-encompassing work that makes brilliance such as Nijinsky’s possible; the vulnerability that is overlooked by audiences who don’t know the risks that male dancers take; and the assumptions made about their beauty and strength: that their performance is an expression of their sexuality, when in reality it is a demonstration of their art and their skill. Performing, they are actually at work and should be respected as such.

While I am grateful to the NGV curators for their correspondence and for prompting me to re-engage with Nijinsky’s life and work, I remain sad that the “fantastic fables” about that gifted artist are being repeated, without critical reflection, still.

– with REBE TAYLOR

EXHIBITION QUEER was held at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) from March 22  to August 22.