Dancing Genius

The Stardom of Vaslav Nijinsky

Hanna Järvinen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137407733
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Tracing the historical figure of Vaslav Nijinsky in contemporary documents and later reminiscences, Dancing Genius opens up questions about authorship in dance, about critical evaluation of performance practice, and the manner in which past events are turned into history.

Part I
The Russian Invasion

1

An Audience for Ballet

Mapping the terrain

In order to understand a culture distant in time and/or place, we must first leave behind (but not forget) our own carefully constructed models of reality, or, as José Gil (1998, ix) put it,

to understand oneself experiencing – and grasping in theoretical images – the circuits of intensity that emerge as one leaves, via a kind of methodological breakout, the domain mapped out by our signs.

Like travellers in unfamiliar terrain, we must stay vigilant for surprising differences and curious even of the seemingly familiar. We need to understand our own difference and rescind our position of expertise about reality, or else we will only see what we expect to see – our own domain – and experience none of the wonders of an alien land. This challenge is particularly difficult the better we think we know the other.

All that we associate with the name ‘Nijinsky’ is intimately tied to his being the figurehead of a company of Russian dancers, the Ballets Russes. Yet, in 1909, when Nijinsky first appeared in Western Europe, he was not the leading dancer of the troupe, which was not even primarily a dance company. The overnight success of the Russian Ballet in Paris is a myth that has obscured many of the cultural complexities involved in the reception and subsequent canonisation of the company and its biggest male star, Nijinsky. Not only were these dancers not the first Russians to have brought their ballet to the West but the responses of audiences were heterogeneous, dependent on hierarchies of art, the changing political environment, issues of social class and gender, of nation and morals, as well as projected cultural ideals (see, for example, E.D. in Revue musical 1 July 1909; Le Théatre 1 August 1909). Although the majority of the reviews in Paris, London and New York were positive in tone, the justifications used for praising the Russians rested on local theories about culture and on stereotypes that need to be analysed, if only because these attitudes have greatly affected how we understand this company and its stars today.

In order to examine the meanings Nijinsky’s audience associated with him and the emergence of the nijinskymania discussed in the Introduction above, this chapter will draft out some of the cultural expectations of his audiences. I discuss how these expectations, some of which were local to Paris or London, constructed the particular framework in which Nijinsky became a star, and a dancing genius. As such, this chapter opens a map of cultural ideas that affected Nijinsky’s position in the public eye, setting aside, for the time being, the rather different cultural discourse of ballet in Russia, discussed in Part III.

Like a map that by no means reproduces the intricacies of the terrain for which it stands, some gross simplifications are necessary for the sake of coherence. Perhaps the largest simplification is the definition of Russia as somehow non-Europe, non-West – one that can be traced to the 1054 division of Christendom into the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths, but also one that, in many ways, indicates an ‘occidental’ world view (Mikkeli 1999, especially 146–7; Wittram 1973, especially 7–8). Nonetheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century such a division was believed to exist – in culture, society, ethics, politics, and even biology. Therefore, any discourse on art was also entangled in debates over race, gender, nation and morality, emphasised when the art in question was of foreign origin. Cultural otherness was racial otherness, biological difference, to an extent difficult to imagine in our world of instant global communications. The Russian dancers were strange and exotic to their Western spectators, scandalous and sensational, and they have been represented as such ever since. Consequently, pointing to how culture was an indication of inherent difference only a century ago draws attention to how many of the stereotypes about our cultural Others (and of ourselves) still prevail.

Of course, representations are always open to different and changing interpretations even if their meaning is restricted by the codes we have access to and by what kinds of other representations are available to us. In some ways, this chapter attempts to chart the horizon of expectations (Koselleck 2004, especially 255–75) available for the audiences of the Russian Ballet. Yet, I want to stress that not all contemporary sources corroborate or concur with these stereotypes about the cultural Other; that not all critics or audience members perceived the world in these terms. A given audience is composed of individuals (Alasuutari 1999, 6), and although an individual critic’s voice is important in the formal reception of an art work, she/he does not represent the audience as a whole and, as a critic, has a specific relationship to art and the specific art work (Citron 1995, 166–70). Having said this, many of those who did perceive the Russians as racial others are the ones cited in research literature as giving particularly truthful insight into the company, its members and its repertoire. Moreover, although representational categories never exclude individuals from belonging to, identifying with, and being identified as representing other (even opposing) categories, they do have an actual impact on the lives of these individuals (for example, Dyer 1993b, especially 1–2; Hall 2002, especially 262–3). Thus, the categories used to define Russians (barbarians, Orientals, and so on) can be used to explain something of the choices made by these particular Russians even if they did not see themselves as belonging to these categories. After all, any successful artistic enterprise has to take into account the expectations of its audience.

The high and the low

Particularly outside academe, the artistic novelty and the aesthetic value of the Diaghilev troupe have been seen as major reasons for its success; and within dance history, the skills of the impresario have been emphasised as being crucial to the success of a Russian ballet company. In 1909, when the Russian company first appeared at the Châtelet theatre, the Paris Opéra company was rarely newsworthy (Gutsche-Miller 2010, especially 19–26) and ballet was associated with variety shows and entertaining spectacles. However, researchers focusing on the Ballets Russes have over-emphasised the degree of and reasons for this apparent disinterest, which did not rest simply on critical realisation of an aesthetic (that is, qualitative) ‘decline’ in the art form.¹ The aesthetic qualities of sets, music or dance technique do not by themselves explain how the Ballets Russes were able to evoke such great interest, and no single individual could have changed the situation, no matter how good they might have been at marketing art (see DeNora 1995, especially on evaluation of greatness 5).

To reiterate a familiar narrative, ballet, based on seventeenth-century court dances, survived the French Revolution to enjoy great public favour during Romanticism, but by 1850, this interest had waned, in part because ballet did not suit the aesthetics of Realism. The aesthetics of ballet rested firmly on notions like grace and elegance, reminiscent of the origins of ballet as an aristocratic pastime, and ballet plots, many of which dealt with the exotic and the supernatural, had few pretensions to addressing social ills or everyday reality that interested artists in other art forms. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, dance was not generally thought of as being suited to the kind of expression of lofty ideas or profound emotional content that was required of ‘real’ art – a view often cited even in favourable reviews of the Ballets Russes (for example, The Times 24 June 1911; The Bellman 13 November 1915). Dancing was performative, its reception focused on the here-and-now of stars and spectacle. Dance works could not be owned or exhibited as bourgeois possessions; and few of them remained in repertories long enough to become regarded as ‘masterpieces’ that could form the tradition and canon necessary for evaluation of new works of art. Moreover, professional dancers tended to come from dubious bohemian origins, and their labour was physical, associating it with the bodily labour of the working classes and with the irrational, sexual body rather than the thinking mind.

Ballet technique became increasingly virtuosic throughout the nineteenth century, and ballet spectacles more spectacular, culminating in the grands ballets of Luigi Manzotti (1835–1905), extremely popular productions filled with thrilling effects that celebrated modern life with little or no plot to connect particular scenes. The success of such ballets associated the already physical art form with the entertainment of the music halls, more concerned with show than with socio-political content.² However, the fact that dance research stresses the popularity of the Romantic ballet and ignores the works by Manzotti and his contemporaries because of their popularity should point to why the Ballets Russes has been categorised as the former rather than the latter: the Russians justified theatrical dance was Art, and moreover, an Art of, for and by the elite. Hence, it was crucial that the 1909 Russian season was one of opera and ballet – in many papers, the opera performances received far more attention than ballet (see, for example, Gil Blas 11 May–15 June 1909).

During the nineteenth century, ballet had lost what remained of its special status as a pastime for aristocratic courts, although in France, the fiction of aristocratic libertinism still governed images of women on stage (Berlanstein 2001, especially 1–8, 13–14, 23–6). As feminist historians have shown, women had relatively little influence on how dance narratives represented gender, let alone how institutions were run (for example, McCarren 1998, especially 52–7, 70–9.) After the July Revolution of 1830, the Paris Opéra lost much of its state funding and underwent drastic institutional changes. The new director, Louis-Désiré Véron (1798–1867), turned the Foyer de la danse into an exclusive back-stage salon, where a limited number of (male) patrons could enjoy the informal company of the (female) dancers. Véron’s excellent contacts with the intellectuals and artists of his day, and his lavish refurbishing of the theatre (including the instalment of new stage technology that allowed for the latest in special effects) may have created the success of the Romantic ballet (Huckenpahler 1984) but, seventy years later, the Foyer de la danse was still equated with an institutionalised seraglio (for example, Bennett in The English Review January 1911; Le Courrier Musical 1 July 1910).

In a book discussing a male dancer, it is noteworthy that together with the dubious reputation of the dancing profession, the heteronormativity of the romantic encounter on stage (where the subject was almost always a man either in pursuit of a woman or set between two women representing different ideals) and offstage (in the Foyer de la danse) made admiring male dancers rather problematic. Outside scientific discourse, discussing sexual desires was fraught with concerns about propriety. Even in France, for (male) critics, lauding a man exhibiting his body came dangerously close to crossing the boundary from homosocial to homosexual; and although male dancing never disappeared (Smith 2007; also Dumesnil 1952), during the nineteenth century discussing the male dancer became laden with the same anxieties about moral health that had influenced the disappearance of male finery in dress and male nudes in art.³ Although more prominent in the English-speaking world, these anxieties also show in the responses of French male dancers to the success of their Russian colleagues (Le Monde illustré 29 May 1909 and 15 July 1911).

Whatever its actual position during Romanticism, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, ballet was not at the cutting edge of intellectual debate anywhere in Europe. Even in Paris, ballet had increasingly become either a variety theatre divertissement or an adjunct of grand opera. Requiring clear rhythm for danced sections interspersed with more expressive music for the mimetic ones (for example, Wiley 1988, 48–9, 58; Smith 2000b, especially 33–8), ballet music did not conform to the lofty ideals associated with music in general, particularly operatic music in the tradition of Wagner.⁴ Overall, the highly conventionalised ballet music followed equally conventional plot-lines and devices for various kinds of staged dancing (Gutsche-Miller 2010, especially 200–73.) At a time when it was believed, to quote the 1873 dictum of Walter Pater (1986, 86), that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”, the reputation of ballet music contributed to the prejudice that dancing was merely entertaining – that it had no social significance or capacity for inspiring the mind. Formulaic sets and revealing costumes only added to this impression.

In contrast, the short works of the Russian Ballet went against the expected principles of ballet. Although the Russians were often praised for the variety of dance styles they mastered (for example, Le Théatre 1 July 1909; The Lady 20 July 1911), individual works kept to one ‘period’ style. Perhaps more importantly, by utilising concert music for character dances they broke the conventions about what kind of music was ‘danceable’. Western critics usually saw this as derivative of contemporary free-form staged dance – the high prestige of music in contemporary aesthetic theories had clearly influenced why, in the late 1890s, some performers (most famously Loïe Fuller and Isadora Duncan) began to use concert music for their dance performances. The use of concert music involved the Russians in existing debates about whether this was a crime against the music and the composer’s intentions or whether it actually enhanced the significance of the dance, turning spectacle into art.⁵

However, the association with other new forms of dancing heightened the physical and ideological distance of the Ballet from what was perceived as ballet in the West. This made the Russians’ dancing less tied to the values present in French ballet and therefore more easily adopted as something incomparable, new and unrelated to French culture, as exemplified by their tradition of ballet. At the same time, new dance forms on stage and off further contributed towards the marked lack of interest in ballet: regardless of the claims to the inherent ‘modernity’ of these new forms, theatrical papers were far more likely to review them simply because they were new, illustrative of contemporary (that is, ‘modern’) culture and of contemporary aesthetic values. Although many variety theatre ballets were set in the present and/or dealt with contemporary topics (see Gutsche-Miller 2010, 254–8, 261, 268–73), the art form still tended to be associated with the old, with past aristocratic glories, and – in the rhetoric of the advocates of new ‘barefoot’ and ‘classical’ dance⁶ – with distorting the (female) body.

Given all this, how was it possible that a troupe of Russian ballet dancers should become the most fashionable thing in the City of Lights? Although aesthetic quality cannot explain the success of the Ballets Russes as a phenomenon, the aesthetic of their pre-war seasons did play its part in creating a social demand for the troupe – a demand that had at least as much to do with the visual designs of the company and the musical scores used as with what was performed on stage. This style looked like a fusion of ballet traditions and forms of new dance, which made it seem novel enough to be appreciated a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: A Genealogy
• Part I The Russian Invasion
• Part II The Silent Body of a Genius
• Part III A Russian Russian Ballet?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index