Hommage to a legend

Last summer and fall, local audiences saw four ballets that Vaslav Nijinsky either choreographed or originally danced. But the Ballets Russes legend himself spent just one week in Los Angeles, in December 1916 while on a U.S. tour. Charlie Chaplin saw him perform at least twice at Clune’s Auditorium and visited him backstage between acts. In turn, Nijinsky made three trips to the set of “Easy Street” at Chaplin’s Lone Star Studio, where the dancer struck the clown as “a serious man with sad eyes” and “a monk dressed in civilian clothes.”

Despite ongoing rumors of lost or hidden reels, Chaplin apparently missed what was perhaps the best opportunity ever to film the Polish Russian artist mythologized for his staggering leap, brazen sensuality, interpretive genius and choreographic insurrections. (No footage of Nijinsky in performance is known to exist.) Less than three years later, at age 29, Nijinsky suffered a career-ending mental breakdown that froze his artistic image in perpetually radiant youth, like an early 20th century Jim Morrison or Bruce Lee.

Nijinsky’s influence did reverberate throughout Chaplin’s career. A character in “Easy Street” mimics Nijinsky’s final collapse in the ballet “Petrushka,” and “Sunnyside” (1919) includes a parody of Nijinsky’s first choreography, “Afternoon of a Faun.” In “The Great Dictator” (1940), the title character dances a solo spoofing the same ballet’s famous ending, and Chaplin acknowledged modeling that movie’s naive barber on Nijinsky. But then, as one of the most photographed men of his era and a pioneering genius in the art of posing for the still camera, Nijinsky may have inspired more literary and artistic interpretations than any other dancer in history.

The romantic tragedy of Nijinsky’s life and work has had an especially profound impact on Milwaukee-born John Neumeier, who began reading about the dance legend at age 10 and has since become the world’s foremost private collector of Nijinsky memorabilia as well as a devoted guardian of the artist’s legacy. For 31 years, Neumeier, now 61, has also directed one of the world’s finest classical dance troupes, the Hamburg Ballet, where he is one of the few choreographers still creating full-length dramatic works. Now, Neumeier and his company are preparing to bring an impressively detailed hommage, “Nijinsky,” to the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Its six performances there, Wednesday through Sunday, will mark the ballet’s U.S. premiere; later this month, it will play Manhattan’s City Center and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Myth and mystery

A virtuoso of unprecedented caliber, an unabashedly erotic interpreter of gender- bending roles, a choreographer of revolutionary ballets, a scandalously open bisexual, a self-styled “philosopher of feeling,” a madman -- Nijinsky left a rich yet puzzlingly fragmented legacy that has long fueled mystery, myth and distortion. Neumeier created his 150-minute work (originally subtitled “Choreographic Approaches”) as part of a flurry of events in 2000 honoring the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death in London on April 8, 1950. Those events included a comprehensive exhibition of Nijinskyana, centering on Neumeier’s own collection, that visited Stockholm and Paris, with a stop in Hamburg that began July 2, 2000, the day of his ballet’s world premiere.

Says Neumeier, who also designed the sets and costumes for the ballet: “I didn’t know what I could do, and I didn’t plan this concept. I only thought that because of this anniversary, this is the moment: ‘You love this man. Say something.’ And he gave me the grace to do it.

“His is one of the most moving stories in the history of art, not just dance art but all of art. Nijinsky followed his vision so consistently in the face of such extraordinary challenges.

“I admire him and look to him for strength and inspiration. Nijinsky is the only artist or person who has never disappointed me. I have never discovered anything where I have to say, ‘Oh, he cheated there.’ ”

The three-city U.S. tour of Neumeier’s ballet is merely the latest development in an international Nijinsky renaissance that, in the last decade, has included the unexpurgated publication of his mad-mystic 1919 journal, impressive exhibitions in the U.S. as well as Europe, two French documentaries, reconstructions of Nijinsky’s third and fourth choreographic works (“Jeux” and “Till Eulenspiegel”), two gallery showcases of interpretive artwork, at least six plays (three old and three new), a feature film by Paul Cox and a set of international dance awards (presented every other year in Monte Carlo).

“What’s astounding,” Neumeier says, “is that he was an artist who began [in 1909] as a personality phenomenon. Then he himself made us pass beyond that when [in 1912] he started his choreography, which did not feed the fire of this personality show. He had a vision which was independent of his own great performance capacities.”

Photographs are the only direct surviving evidence of Nijinsky’s living art. Whether he was at work or in repose, in nearly every one his gaze projects disarming candor, utter sincerity, compassion and, even in darker roles, gentleness. Another quality consistently apparent is a simplicity that seems Zen-like, serene, soulful, knowing, even wise.

“He was such a sensitive creator at a time when the world was realizing its potential for cruelty, during the First World War. The complete contrast literally scorched him,” Neumeier says.

“Then, in the diary -- which of course is on the threshold of both insanity and the next world -- he goes way beyond ballet or dance and just tells us about being a man in this world, with certain far-out fantasies about individual responsibility.”

Neumeier’s hommage begins on Jan. 19, 1919, with the dancer’s last public performance, a bewildering solo recital that he called his “Wedding With God.” Neumeier’s set is a meticulous re-creation of the actual recital hall, which only a few years ago was torn out of the Suvretta House hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland. From this beginning, characters from Nijinsky’s life on and off stage -- including his wife, Romola, siblings Bronislava and Stanislav, and impresario Sergei Diaghilev -- launch into a free-associative kaleidoscope of time, space, memory and identity, danced to music by Chopin, Schumann, Rimsky-Korsakov and Shostakovich. Act 1 centers on Nijinsky’s art and tangled relationships, Act 2 on war and madness.

As Neumeier puts it: “People and events run into each other out of chronological order. Roles are exchanged between real-life persons and characters from the ballets he danced or choreographed.”

Neumeier does not directly quote the choreography that Nijinksy created or made famous, but multiple Nijinskys often perform simultaneously in the ballet to represent fragments of the artist’s personality, with one figure symbolizing the man and others costumed for, and dancing partly in the style of, his famous roles.

The ballet is closest in form, the choreographer says, to the Joycean stream of consciousness of Nijinsky’s famously tortured journal, begun a few hours before his last performance and completed 45 days later, hours before he was first institutionalized. (He remained so for much of the next 31 years.)

The journal documents an erratic and ultimately tragic dance involving several states of mind or consciousness, including a psychological imbalance of a complex and debatable nature as well as a sincere experience of spiritual enlightenment that cannot be easily or cynically dismissed. His simple, almost childlike writing places particular emphasis on “feeling,” a quasi-mystical form of intuitive, empathic perception that for Nijinsky was humanity’s best hope of attaining the enlightened social conditions he so ardently pleaded for: love, unity, happiness, environmental conservation, socialist economics and a wise use of technology.

Modernist creativity

During the same period, Nijinsky made hundreds of haunting, circle-based drawings and paintings that recall the era’s nonobjective Russian art. His diary and visual works, previously dismissed as entirely pathological and still enigmatic, are now recognized as significant continuations of his groundbreaking modernist creativity, undertaken when circumstances separated him from the concert stage.

After his scandalously erotic debut as a choreographer, which he carefully notated, Nijinsky created only three more fully produced works: “Jeux” and the riot-provoking “Rite of Spring,” shown fewer than 10 times each in Paris and London during 1913, and “Till Eulenspiegel,” shown just 23 times during the 1916-17 American tour. All three were presumed lost until the London-based husband-and-wife team of choreographer Millicent Hodson and art historian Kenneth Archer reconstructed them, starting with the Joffrey Ballet production of “Rite” that had its 1987 world premiere (and a reprise last summer) at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and helped cement Nijinsky’s place in the pantheon of such modern art pioneers as Picasso, Joyce, Pound, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

According to Hodson, “In Nijinsky’s choreography, new movement forms are not for their own sake. In the most concrete sense, they are linked to and express new meanings -- for example, new types of relationships, as seen in ‘Jeux’ [an abstract treatment of a three-way flirtation] and new perspectives on political forces, as seen in ‘Till’ [a tragicomic political drama]. John has found resonance in Nijinsky’s work on this humanistic, philosophical level.”

Bruce Sansom spent 13 years as a principal dancer with London’s Royal Ballet and starred in that company’s 2000 production of the Hodson-Archer “Jeux.” Now hoping to direct a company of his own, Sansom says: “The Nijinsky material is John’s life work. His dancers are so strong on stage, and I always get drawn in when I see genuine artists performing.

“When we worked on ‘Jeux,’ Millicent fed us a wealth of information about Nijinsky. It looks like John has done the same with his dancers. When performers have abundant reference points, they can step away from playing the role and become the role. They are no longer doing the choreographer’s bidding but becoming the creation that the choreographer has envisioned.”

And the point of that vision?

“I want to preserve everything about this man,” Neumeier says, “so that even if it is not me, one day someone might put together the pieces of this puzzle: without a final answer -- because no human being is without mystery -- but so that the light of Nijinsky can help lead us toward genuine ideals in this extremely commercial-orientated art world.”

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Hamburg Ballet

When: Wednesday through Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price: $20-$75

Contact: (213) 365-3500

Boulder, Colo.-based Gesmer has written extensively about Nijinsky.