The Australian Ballet: Nijinsky
Arts Centre Melbourne, 7 September
It was a coup for David McAllister to get Neumeier's permission to stage Nijinsky for the Australian Ballet, giving audiences here a chance to experience a production by the legendary choreographer and director who has led the Hamburg Ballet since 1973.
Neumeier wanted to create a company which would be, in his words, like a very great Actors Company, and much of Neumeier's work is actually based on great literature. His interest lies with telling stories, developing characters, and calling on dancers to be actors, actors who can apply the Stanislavsky school of 'method acting' to their movement and to their bodies as vehicles of expression. This is human dance, dance which is fiercely and avowedly about something, rather than dance for the sake of itself. In a context where contemporary ballet is often deprived of this kind of dramatic story-telling and pared down to experiments in form and abstraction, it is good to be reminded of just how powerful a language of dramatic narrative it can offer, and, dare I say it, of the deeper purpose it is capable of serving.
In Nijinsky some of the darkest recesses of the human mind and the human condition are laid bare - the manipulation of others for love, power and status, the fragility of a creative psyche, the descent into the hellish circle of insanity.
Nijinsky himself has been a constant presence running through Neumeier's own life. Neumeier has also choreographed ballets based on the famous Ballets Russes productions in which Nijinsky starred and which he created, so a ballet about Nijnsky, his life and tragic demise, was almost inevitable.
The first part of the ballet works superbly on every level. It opens with Nijinsky's final public performance which took place in a Swiss hotel in 1919. Nijinsky declared he would dance the war and proceeded to shock the audience with his violent disjointed movements. It was as though he had laid himself bare to the whole horror of what was happening in the collective psyche and was drowning in it. The act unfolds as memories flood in on the tortured dancer of his disastrous relationships and his former great roles. The two levels of reality become confused as they did in real life, with Romola being seduced more by the Faun than the man. The sensuous music of Scheherazade forms a backdrop to much of the action, as do quotations from the original Ballets Russes productions, conveying a sense of the colour, excitement and heady seductiveness of that world. Against all of this we can sense Nijinsky's sense of entrapment in the power games of others, made all the more poignant by being juxtaposed to such a lushly beautiful score. He cannot escape the enchanted circle which has been created around him, a circle which later manifests as one of his fixations, and which Neumeier picks up on as the dominant design element of the second part in which it evokes the enclosing circle of madness which Nijinsky cannot escape.
This second part is a drawn out encounter with insanity as we witness the Bayadère Shades accelerating their entry into a manic dance, the ordered madness of militarism and war, and the frantic disintegration of classical balletic forms all seen through the disintegrating prism of Nijinsky's own personality. Throughout it all Romola stays loyal, as depicted in a long drawn out duet for the two of them, literally dragging her husband from asylum to asylum in the vain hope of a cure. The broken puppet Petruschka, aptly enough one of Nijinsky's greatest roles (and performed with great pathos by Brett Simon) surfaces as the dominant alter ego in this half. Fokine's choreography is further distorted and exaggerated while Nijinsky is implied to be the broken puppet of his master, Diaghilev.
The endless quality of Nijinsky's suffering - thirty years in all - seems to suffuse Part II which shows the prolonged drawn out anguish of Nijinsky's mental illness but lacks the spontaneity and buoyancy of the first half. Mental illness after all can become very banal in the end, as it did for Nijinsky, and theatrically that is quite difficult to pull off.
Some of the highlights of Nijinsky are to be found in the skill with which Neumeier integrates quotations from the Ballets Russes ballets, using them in the context of his own ballet. There is still something about that explosion of creativity across all the art forms involved which has not been equalled since and which still has not lost its radical freshness, or its ability to inspire future generations.
The presence of Hamburg Ballet principal Alexandre Riabko in the title role of Nijinsky galvanized the company. Riabko was superb, taking every risk with the choreography and the delving into the character's fragile psyche, inhabiting his role from the inside.
Amy Harris brought both dignity and fluency to Romola, the groupie turned wife, and it was good to see Leanne Stojmenov back, secure and powerful as Bronislava. But the evening belonged to the men of the company, whether doubling Nijinsky in the flashbacks to his famous roles, functioning as alter egos, or shadowing him as extensions of his own fragmented disintegrating psyche. Cristiano Martino brought seductiveness and a feline exoticism to the Golden Slave and the Faun, while François-Eloi Lavignac was another who stood out in his fearless portrayal of Stanislav, Nijinsky's older brother who was tortured by madness from an early age.
As in most of his ballets, Neumeier did not only choreograph Nijinsky but also designed the set, lighting and costumes. The staging and use of indirect lighting and colour had a freshness rarely seen here. Another feature was the exquisitely expressive use of arms and hands, to say nothing of the expressiveness of faces, a welcome move away from what is often a focus on legs and feet. At its best this is compelling ballet and compelling theatre.
- IRINA KUZMINSKY