Dance - Part Three

There they are. I suppose it is 1914 or thereabouts. My grandfather is sitting next to his father. He might be about 26; unmarried, tall and strong. He worked up in the back country with his Dad building fences. Lying on bracken in a tent with a lamp he might have written letters to a girl he had seen around. The night sky must have seemed enormous and full of stars.

His brothers are standing. One of them is going to war. He is called George. What did George believe in before he went to war?

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On the 29th of May, 1913 Nijinsky premiered Le Sacre du Printemps.

"Sacre shows spring returning after a glacial pre-historical winter in Russia. The earth is budding with fertility, squirming with new life. There are processions and dances of people awakened. Youths and elders convene. A young virgin is chosen for the ritual sacrifice, and she dances herself to death." (p.67)Nijinsky went in a new direction with the choreography:"He forced the dancers to the ground, feet turned in with knees unbent, hands, elbows, and faces pointing down.... Nijinsky thrust the dancers into circles, single, double, triple, and interlocking loops of seething humanity. All conventions of classical ballet were eliminated. There was something ruthlessly primitive even bestial about his choreography." (p.67)

After a programme that began with the romantic music of Chopin setting off a classical ballet the Parisian audience were subjected to the shrieking music of Stravinsky and the anti-classical ballet of Nijinsky. There was a riot.

Madness! they cried from the audience.

The booing and jeering was so loud the dancers couldn't hear the orchestra. Nijinsky stood in the wings on a chair shouting numbers to his dancers while Stravinsky held on to his tuxedo tails.

Now The Rite of Spring so mainstream it has to be updated. Funny how times change. How the madness of one generation becomes the conventional in another.

I suppose that in 1913 Europeans thought that reason and order and pleasing music with pleasing forms was why their civilisation was great, and why war had been eliminated from the continent - a relic of a more barbaric era.

Between 1913 and 1920 things didn't go too well for Nijinsky.

He had been out of the limelight for awhile by 1919 and was planning a big comeback performance. This is his version of the show:

"I played nervously on purpose, because the audience will understand me better if I am nervous. One must be nervous. I was nervous because God wanted to arouse the audience. The audience came to be amused. They thought I was dancing to amuse them. I danced frightening things. They were frightened of me and therefore thought that I wanted to kill them. I did not want to kill anyone. I loved everyone, but no one loved me, and therefore I became nervous. The audience did not like me, because they wanted to leave. Then I began to play cheerful things."

Here is what he actually did for his comeback:

"Suddenly the great dancer appeared, still very attractive with his muscular body, slender torso, beautifully sloping shoulders, long neck, oval face and catlike eyes. With the taut grace of a tiger he walked over to the pianist and told her to play something by Chopin or Schumann. The music started. Nijinsky picked up a chair, sat on it facing the audience, and stared back without moving a muscle. The pianist played on. Time went by. Then, the music stopped and there was dead silence. It seemed endless. The music started again. But nothing else happened. Nijinsky just sat there." (p.180)

Our biographer of the penis concludes: "Again Nijinsky was way ahead of his time."

Once Nijinsky snapped out of this he did a little jig, and then he danced "the war". "The war which you did not prevent and are also responsible for," he explained. This started off quite well but ended badly. Afterwards he showed the audience his bleeding feet. Some of the ladies he showed them to were a bit squeamish about this. He thought they wanted to have sex with him.

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This is how George’s niece remembered him:

George served in the Great War. When I was about ten he took me to the local shop and bought me a pair of white gym shoes. On the way back, walking through the park, our conversation turned to Christianity; life and death anyway. How this came about I have no idea. I recall him saying: "When you die you are buried in the ground and that is the end." This statement shocked me.

Fancy not believing in God after serving in WWI. Really, WWI was a PR disaster for God. All those Christians slaughtering each other for no real reason. Mind you, it took the wind out of the sails of “human reason leading us to a better world” brigade as well, the kind of people who believed in mental institutions and lobotomies.