Nijinsky by Lucy Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

composing
Sacre
, Nijinsky ‘was as helpless as a child and relied entirely on suggestions from Diaghilev and Stravinsky’. Because Nijinsky’s method relied upon working out movements on his own body and then demonstrating them to his dancers – ‘something he brought with him and showed you and you could either do it or you couldn’t do it’ – rather than working spontaneously with them as Fokine had used to, many of the dancers assumed Diaghilev worked out the steps and showed them to Nijinsky, who was then expected to teach them to the company. However Diaghilev’s faith in his taciturn friend’s capacity for communication was so limited that he had brought in Marie Rambert to help him explain what he wanted from the dancers. That Diaghilev was the ultimate source of the ballet and only used Nijinsky as his interpreter is as unlikely as the image of the portly impresario stomping around a hotel suite demonstrating to Nijinsky the Chosen Maiden’s solo, though this is what Serge Lifar would later claim on Diaghilev’s behalf.
    Throughout the choreographic process, Stravinsky worked closely with Nijinsky, attending rehearsals whenever he could – and once furiously pushing aside the fat German accompanist, whom Diaghilev had nicknamed Kolossal, to play the music the way he intended it: ‘twice as fast as we had been doing it, and twice as fast as we could possibly dance,’ remembered Marie Rambert. ‘He stamped his feet on the floor and banged his fist on the piano and sang and shouted, all to give us an impression of the rhythms of the music and the colour of the orchestra.’
    He annoyed Nijinsky, though, by his time-wasting assumption that he was the only one who knew anything about music. ‘He explains the value of the black notes, the white notes, of quavers and semi-quavers,as though I had never studied music at all,’ Vaslav complained to Bronia, who replied that since Stravinsky did that with everybody Vaslav shouldn’t take it personally. While Stravinsky may not have believed that anyone other than himself understood music, he expected Nijinsky to listen to his ideas about dance. Luckily his ideas for
Sacre
were closely in line with Nijinsky’s. Throughout the collaborative process Stravinsky declared repeatedly that he and Nijinsky were wholly in tune. His conviction that the movement should be all dancing with no mime was perhaps a response to
Petrushka
, in which emotions and drama had been conveyed as much through facial expression as by using the body, a style Nijinsky had already moved away from in
Faune
and
Jeux
.
    Like Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Stravinsky was in contact with Jaques-Dalcroze, who wrote to him in January 1913 to argue that only when the musician understood the human body as fully as the dancer’s body was impregnated by the music would the regeneration of ballet that Stravinsky had initiated be complete. All three of them were influenced by Dalcroze’s idea that in dance each musical note should be expressed by a corresponding movement; this would become one of the defining, and controversial, ideas behind
Sacre
’s choreography. Using Dalcrozian theory as a starting point, Nijinsky would originate the important ‘idea of the ballet as an organism broken up into interacting members, dancing in relation to itself and to each other, keeping the time of its unit in relation to the great pulse of the whole’.
    Throughout the summer and autumn of 1912, when he had time, Vaslav was planning
Sacre
, writing out his ideas swathed in a hotel dressing gown, the hood pulled down over his face like a prize-fighter’s. The solidity, strength and simplicity of modern art – especially that of Gauguin – fascinated him, reflecting as it did his own preoccupations with rejecting illusion and artifice. Like Stravinsky he wanted to challenge preconceptions, violate rules and redefine expectations