Hamburg Honors Nijinsky both on stage and with the most extensive exhibition of his paintings
John Neumeier: “Nijinsky” and “Dance of Colours – Nijinsky´s Eye and Abstraction”
Hamburg Ballet John Neumeier at the Opera-House and Hamburger Kunsthalle
Hamburg
May 19, 2009
by Horst Koegler
copyright @2009 by Horst Koegler
On May 19, 2009, at 20.05 p.m., John Neumeier told the 1674 visitors of the capacity filled Hamburg Opera House, that exactly 100 years ago ballet had entered the Modern Age with the debut of Diaghilev´s Ballets Russes at the Paris Théâtre du Châtelet – that is one hundred years minus thirty minutes, for the Paris performance had started half an hour later. For Hamburg it meant the 90th performance of Neumeier´s ballet “Nijinsky” since its premiere on 2nd July 2000 – 16 months prior to that fatal New York date of September 2001.
In his short introductory speech, palpitated by the heart-beat of his memory, it became clear how much this day personally meant to him, signalizing the fulfillment of the dream of his life. It had been the chance encounter of an early book on Nijinsky at his local library back in distant Milwaukee, that had started his life-long obsession to explore the life and work of the legendary dancer and choreographer by collecting pictures and posters, books, sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs – in fact everything he could get hold of – and thus building up his vast collection of Nijinskyana, now housed at his Hamburg home. In half a century he has been able to buy and acquire all sorts of documentary material concerning Nijinsky´s life and career all over the world, thus assembling the biggest private collection of his estate.
It was the gala performance which vividly brought to life the tumultuous events of Nijinsky´s artistic and private life. In the first part, performed mainly to excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov´s “Sheherazade” plus some Chopin and Schumann, Neumeier arranged a sort of collage of Nijinsky´s most famous roles as Harlequin (in “Carnaval”), Spectre (“… de la rose”), Golden Slave (in “Sheherazade”), Jeune Homme (in “Jeux”), Faune (in “L´après- midi…”), Petrushka and as the partner of Tamara Karsavina. These show him as Diaghilev´s darling lover and in his dealings with his family: the worried mother, the stern father, his trustful companionship with his sister Bronislava and his pity for his spastic brother Stanislav - also his first innocent dallyings with Romola who later marries him and thus causes the break with Diaghilev who seeks and finds a quick replacement in the young Massine.
This part shows Nijinsky's charismatic versatility which dazzled his contemporaries, female and male alike. And in it Alexandre Riabko (originally from Kiev, but honed in the master-classes of the Hamburg Ballet School) is truly fascinating, a young man of lean build with an almost tigerish attack and leap, a bewitching technician, and as an actor a man of mesmeric spells, as if he carried in himself a stock of irreconcilable characters. But then Hamburg has truly a starry array of individuals, Thiago Bordin as Harlequin, Otto Bubenicek as the Golden Slave, Carsten Jung as Faune, Lloyd Riggins as Petrushka, Ivan Urban as Diaghilev, Silvia Azzoni as Karsavina, Joelle Boulogne as mother, Anna Polikarpova returned from her long maternity leave as Romola, and Yukichi Hattori guesting in the role he originally created as the tormented brother Stanislav. Add to these the elegantly moving crowd of society people, and you have the carefree representatives of a wealthy international pre World War One clientele.
The atmosphere markedly darkens in part two, with the world War ranging not only in the background, the Diaghilev troupe still performing but without its former super star, and Rimsky´s sweetly and lush melodies replaced by the blaring sounds of Shostakovitch´s 11th symphony. Here one becomes very much aware of Shostakovitch as the legitimate heir of Gustav Mahler as a musical diarist of a disintegrating world – and hadn´t Neumeier in a former period of his life created a whole bulk of ballets to music by Mahler?). Nijinsky becomes more and more frantic, thinks in geometric lines and circles and is carried by his wife on a small toboggan in his desperate attempt at finding some rest from his escalating attacks of schizophrenia. It is heartbreaking to watch his mental decline as Riabko retreats more and more into zones, into which nobody of his entourage is able to follow him, while the paper world of his drawings is taking on life of its own. It yields into his last private performance at a hotel in Switzerland at a benefit for the Red Cross, where war and death intermingle, and in which he finally crosses the border to the land of no return, entering it like the prophet of the Apocalypse.
There have been very few moments in the about seventy years of my life as a professional theatre visitor of comparable tragic inevitability: a world which has come to its final end. It resulted as one of the supreme experiences of what theatre at the start of the 21st century is still able to achieve – and a splendid proof of the Hamburg Ballet´s artistic status, Neumeier has shaped during the 35 years of his reign at the banks of the river Elbe.
And yet there had happened another event two hours before the Nijinsky Gala performance started which perhaps marked an event with even farther reaching historical consequences. And that was the vernissage of the exhibition “Tanz der Farben – Nijinskys Auge und die Abstraktion” at the nearby Hamburger Kunsthalle (“Dance of Colours - Nijinsky´s Eye and the Abstraction”). This presents the first showing anywhere in the world the entire oeuvre of coloured drawings and gouaches Nijinsky created in 1918 and 1919 (that is after the termination of his career as a dancer), some hundred objects from his own hand, most of them now owned by and collected in the Foundation John Neumeier plus about the same number of works by contemporary artists, and it is this confrontation which establishes Nijinsky among the very elite of abstractionists from all parts of the world. While so far his known drawings and sketches had been considered somewhat dilettantish off-products of his deranged mind, they emerge in this context as true masterworks which hold their own against the stiff competition among the best colleagues of the Paris after world war one scene, represented by such famous names like Sonia Delauney-Terk, Alexandra Exter, Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, Léopold Survage and the Czeck Frantisek Kupka. (who all are shown in Hamburg in individual compartments). With finely drawn coloured circles and ellipses Nijinsky created a succession of sheets, which connect space and view, while rhythm and colour structure the dynamism of this abstract choreography, so that the figures on the paper seems to acquire a dancing life of their own.
In the fabulous catalogue with all German texts translated into English and hundreds of coloured pictures, Nijinsky´s visions take on the quality of fictionalized ballets. In their joint Foreword, Hubertus Gassner as Director of the Hamburg Kunsthalle, and John Neumeier as the Intendant (General Manager) of the Hamburg Ballet, as the two men who are responsible for this vast exhibition, seem to melt into one, a fictitious Diaghilev, who, 80 Years after his death, has resurrected to vindicate his original vision of Nijinsky as the artist to emancipate ballet from its traditional bonds and to lead it into its new Age of Enlightenment on the side of the most creative artists of the 20th century. Actually they state that dance as performed by Nijinsky and envisioned in his paintings “freed itself from the principles of the narrative ballet that had determined the character of stage dance from Romantic era to the late nineteenth century and beyond. The Russians in particular deserve credit for the development of a non-narrative choreography that corresponds to painting´s parallel renouncement of history pictures or genre scenes, and ultimately of any and all illustration.”
It is in the following analytical writings of eminent art historians and scientists that the approaches and different directions of ways are explored into which after “Sacre du printemps” choreography might develop – always accompanied by a host of appropriate pictures and quotations from Nijinsky´s diaries.
It is Neumeier who tentatively tentatively asks “Can it be that witnessing Nijinsky´s cosmos, through his own drawings, gives immediacy – gives a sense of the living present to this great enigma of the past?”
The great Hamburg exhibition (running through Augst 16, 2009) represents the most conceivable affirmative answer to that question. The beautifully printed and lavishly illustrated catalogue, published by Hubertus Gassner and Daniel Koep, costs 32 Euro, and can be ordered through the Museum Shop or via www.freunde-der-kunsthalle.de
During the preparations of the Hamburg Hommage à Nijinsky a controversy arose about the birth-date of John Neumeier. While all official documents, dictionaries and the Wikopedia list 24 February 1942 and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as his birthday, the catholic Hamburg parish of St. Elisabeth recently congratulated him to his 70th birthday, In that case he would have been born already in 1939. Neither the press officer of the Hamburg Senate nor the press lady of the Hamburg Ballet were able to comment on this welter of opinions, nor did he himself make any attempt to clear up the mess. Maybe that some day one investigative Wisconsin journalist might have a look at the appropriate Minneapolis parish registers!