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The Nijinsky MystiqueThe Joffrey Ballet of Chicago With its astonishing program The Nijinsky Mystique, the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago makes one point above all: that the biggest sensation of this year's dance season was choreographed in 1913. The American premiere of Jeux (Games), as reconstructed by Millicent Hodson, shares the bill with the choreographer's Afternoon of a Faun and The Rite of Spring. Together the pieces demonstrate that Vaslav Nijinsky invented not only modern dance but much of the modern point of view, one skeptical of authority, open about sex and heedless of boundaries between public and private, male and female, ritual and play. Jeux is so contemporary that it takes a moment to register its brilliance. It might be taken for a standard piece of gender-bending from Mark Morris, but only to the extent a Frank Lloyd Wright could be taken for an ordinary ranch house. The work is that far ahead of its time, as three dancers sporting tennis clothes play with each other in every sense and in every possible combination. After Calvin Kitten spends the opening solo (originally danced by Nijinsky himself) swinging his racquet at an invisible ball, Suzanne Lopez and Taryn Kaaschock enter, garbed and coiffed identically, and square off as if to box. (Mesdemoiselles Ali and Frazier take note.) The dancers' akimbo arms and deliberate awkwardness recall, or rather anticipate, Twyla Tharp, while the shifting combinations of man and women suggest the "Two Ladies [and He's the Only Man]" number from Cabaret. But Bob Fosse owes Nijinsky even more for daring to move the swivelling pelvis out of the burlesque hall and onto the legitimate stage. Gradually, and with admirable subtlety, Lopez and Kaaschock notice that they're more interested in each other than in Kitten, and he finds himself out in the cold. He can prevent the women from kissing but not compel his own return to the center of their attention. Fosse paid homage to this, too: hero Joe Gideon of All That Jazz recalls a menage a trois that ended when one woman vanished leaving a note, "I cannot share you." "Frankly," he says, "I was flattered." "Really?" replies his interlocutor. "How did you know the note was for you?" Jeux ultimately returns from courting ritual to on-court playfulness, as the choreographer relieves the sexual tension by having a tennis ball bounce across the stage. The women follow in its wake and Kitten is left alone, racquet at the ready, waiting for a climax that will never come. Afternoon of a Faun, on the other hand, is nothing but sexual tension, being perhaps the single most explicit performance ever presented as high art. The Faun's costume (copied directly from the one worn by Nijinsky) features not only a suggestive cluster of berries at the crotch but a furiously erect and vibrating rubber tail, a combination that makes him look like a phallic Janus. If the choreographer were alive, the Joffrey would be risking its NEA funding by performing his work. It's hard to get more contemporary than that. Once again, the piece matches a single man (Domingo Rubio) with multiple women, here a cluster of nymphs. Once again, the choreographer posits a power struggle between the sexes: either the Faun kneels to the nymphs or they kneel to him. (No current resonance there, of course.) And once again, the moves are so fresh it's hard to believe they're 90 years old -- especially when the Faun slides across the stage doing a moonwalk that would put Michael Jackson to shame. In addition to gestures of his own invention, Nijinsky uses the angular arms and stamped feet of Bharata Natyam, the Hindu temple dancing of south India, and the single-line formation of Greek folk dancing. Aware of all dance traditions, he is bound by none of them. As a dancer, Nijinsky was a matinee idol, and the piece inevitably suffers from his absence. (The Joffrey minimized the damage in its 1979 revival by casting Rudolph Nureyev as the Faun.) Just as dance audiences last year welcomed the opportunity to watch Mikhail Baryshnikov walk across the stage in otherwise forgettable postmodern pieces, so dance audiences in 1912 were happy to watch Nijinsky pause to display himself and run highly appreciative hands over his own musculature. Rubio is an able dancer but of no particular interest as a model. Still, the interludes of posing provide relief from the piece's insistent vulgarity. Finally the nymphs' leader (Deborah Dawn) runs away, leaving the Faun with her scarf, which he drapes across himself in a gesture suggesting both cross-dressing and Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils. When he sniffs the veil and then masturbates against a rock, the piece's priapism seems less playful than compulsive, but it's certainly a refreshing change from the coy sexual allusions of traditional ballet. The Rite of Spring shows Nijinsky at his most determined to blur the line between ritual and play, as if to argue that the venerated traditions of his own time (religious, patriotic, artistic) were no more than elaborate pretenses. The first act begins with a corps dressed in some Victorian composite notion of the 'primitive' -- Pocahontas braids for the women, animal skins for the men, and bright red cross-garters for all -- dispersed into a quartet of rings facing inward. Each ring in turn enacts a brief ceremony, one jumping over sticks Hawaiian-style -- was there anything about world dancing Nijinsky didn't know? -- another playing ring-around-the-rosy, others stomping and rocking until the only thing missing is a war-cry. There are pas de deux within each ring, but the couplings are joyless: the women avert their eyes as the men throw them around like rag dolls. Then the men abandon the women entirely to assemble in rigid formation and goose-step across the stage, a moment obviously intended to be chilling even before the Nazis claimed the step as their own. Despite the riot of color and movement, though, these maneuvers have no consequences -- they're just games. But those games turn deadly in Act II, with the sacrifice of the Chosen One (Deanne Brown, in an extraordinary performance). The bear-skinned men dance around her, jumping from low crouches high into the air and grunting like the apes of 2001: A Space Odyssey watching the birth of a new world. They toss the Chosen One from hand to hand, and then confine her to the center of the circle. She might be 'it' in dodge ball, but here the fate of 'it' is to die. Brown stands proud but terrified like Joan of Arc at the stake and then falls and rises, falls and rises in a reenactment of Christ's walk toward Calvary. Patterns of movement shape themselves into a ritual of blood. The pigeon-toed posture, interwoven lines and clenched fists Nijinsky created have become familiar through the medium of Martha Graham, as has the dancers' side-facing shuffle with one arm crooked up and ahead, the other under and behind, in homage to classical friezes. The Joffrey dancers seem oddly unsure of these now-standard moves, but it's difficult to judge precision, usually a company hallmark, when the work is so determinedly awkward. Strange that the task of excavating the foundations of modern dance should fall to a ballet company; but the Joffrey has managed it with spontaneity and excitement as well as accuracy. Dance lovers -- indeed, anyone who wonders about the sources of the modern world -- should seize this opportunity to examine what's under the ground on which dance-makers are still building. The return is remarkably high: to see every move that defines the past 100 years, invest just one evening at the Joffrey. The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago will present The Nijinsky Mystique at the Kennedy Center from February 26 to March 8, with dates in other locations to be announced. --Kelly Kleiman |
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