Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev, great myths of stage dance, could not have been more different in all respects: their personalities were radically oppositeas well as their personal lives and the ways they related to the rest of the world.
Well, Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev shared, without having ever seen each other, that mighty fate of being the two male figures of the ballet most popular and influential of the 20th century.
We can talk at length about what differentiated them. But for all their contrasts, there were striking coincidences between them and this is where it would be convenient to start.
Russians, but not so much
Both Nijinsky (1890-1950) and Nureyev (1939-1991) were born in Russia, although neither was strictly speaking Russian of the word.
The first was part of a Polish family; the second, was the son of Tartars. Their childhood (or at least much of their childhood in Nijinsky’s case) grew up in conditions of marked poverty; later in their lives, however, they came to enter highly sophisticated circles.
Both They studied – sometimes, of course, very distant from each other – at the very famous school of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg and then they entered his ballet company; the beginnings of both were particularly brilliant; later, without abandoning his acting career, they turned to choreographic creation.
Vaslav Nijinsky put together four works in total, absolutely avant-garde and brilliant; one of them is Spring consecrationto music by Igor Stravinsky, premiered in 1913 caused the most violent riot in the scene’s history.
The audience booed, divided between detractors and admirers, howled, kicked, booed to the point that the dancers could not hear the orchestra and Nijinsky, backstage, shouted the lines trying not to get lost. Two men from the audience even came to duel.
Rudolf Nureyev devoted himself centrally to the revision of the great ballets of the 19th century, without abandoning the academic framework in which he was trained but with a very personal perspective.
scandalous breakups
Both left the Mariinsky Ballet (called Kirov in Nureyev’s time) in more or less scandalous ways.
Thus was Nijinsky’s break: in 1911, while still belonging to the Mariinsky Ballet, he had already done two seasons in Paris with the Ballets Russes of Serguei Diaghilev, a powerful businessman and lover of the dancer.
It was Diaghilev who suggested to Vaslav a very short jacket for his ballet character. gisela in the St. Petersburg season. The director of the Mariinsky considered that wardrobe indecent, Nijinsky refused to change it, there were many arguments and he was fired; great joy for Diaghilev, who thus definitely has a superstar in his company.
For his part, Nureyev sought asylum in France in June 1961. during a tour of the Kirov (formerly Mariinsky) ballet; It was an escape typical of a spy film which involved KGB agents, employees of the Parisian airport of Orly and friends of the dancer in the same vortex.
Uprooting, sexuality and death
Both they left Russia early and forever. Nijinsky in 1909 and Nureyev in 1961, even if he returned for a few days in 1987 and 1989. The sort of uprooting they experienced seems to be linked to the instability of their lives: neither of them had a homeland, a city, a place they could name as own.
This imbalance was also reflected in the way in which both lived their own sexuality: Nijinsky himself reveals it in his diaries -in which he speaks of Diaghilev as a monster- and in his raids, just a teenager, in the sleaziest brothels of St. Petersburg.
His marriage to Romola de Pulzky and his two daughters by her were not enough to balance his tormented personality: they sadly coincided with the beginnings of his irreversible plunge into madness.
For his part Nureyev he has always compulsively sought numerous sexual partners, both men and women, despite the long mutual love relationship she had with the Danish dancer Erik Bruhn. In the last phase of her life he reached an irrepressible promiscuity.
In the end, Nijinsky’s agony in later psychiatric hospitals lasted thirty years. Nureyev’s was much shorter, but no less terrible for this: the image of his body destroyed by AIDS went around the world with that cold indiscretion typical of the yellow press.
They brought new audiences to the ballet
So far the coincidences that we could define as “personal”. But it is possible to go further: ballet, which throughout the 19th century had been an almost exclusively female territory, was greatly re-evaluated by these two artists.
In a sense they were ballet proselytists – they brought a new audience to this genrenot only for their qualities as dancers, but also for their peculiar scenic magnetism.
This game of parallelisms and differences is precisely a game, because the opposite direction can also be traced: how many things they did not have in common. For example, the ways in which they conducted their respective careers: Nijinsky, despite his immense talent, he failed – once separated from Diaghilev – to support his own projects.
Rudolf Nureyev, on the other hand, he led his career brilliantly and managed to collect a colossal fortune. Instead, he was a worldly man, possessed by the desire to never go unnoticed.
His colleague Vaslav, on the other extreme, was in solitary confinement bordering on autism. Lidia Sokolova, companion of the dancer in the Ballets Russes, remembered him like this: “Nijinsky was a wild creature that she was trapped in society and did not feel comfortable in it.
Nureyev made the following self-portrait: “When you hear Bach’s music, you hear a part of God. When you see a well-performed Shakespearean work, you are seeing a part of God. When you see me dance, you’re looking at a part of God”.
Yup, he was a perfect star but also a tireless and rigorous worker that he demanded from others as much as he demanded from himself. In this sense, not unlike Nijinsky who used, for example, a hundred essays to assemble nap of a faun, a work that lasts twelve minutes. It was what I needed for the dancers to assimilate the very atypical movements of the choreography.
And thus tying this web of similarities and contrasts together, one could conclude with a simple summary: Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev trained in a highly traditional ballet school, conquered the West, turned to startling iconoclasm, and advanced , paying large expensesfor the toughest and most difficult of theatrical professions.
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Source: Clarin
