Vaslav Nijinsky

Vaslav Nijinsky was the most celebrated male dancer who has ever lived, made four ballets, and spent the last thirty years of his life in and out of asylums. He was trained at the Imperial school in St Petersburg, and what audiences described was not technique but a way of leaving the ground that seemed to pause - the Mariinsky and then the Ballets Russes built repertoire around it. Diaghilev took him as lover and star from 1909, and he danced Le Spectre de la rose, Petrushka and Scheherazade to a fame no dancer had had before. As a choreographer he was something else again and lasted three years: L'Apres-midi d'un faune in 1912 ended with a gesture the Paris press called obscene, and The Rite of Spring in 1913 replaced turnout and line with turned-in feet and stamping, which is half of why the premiere became a riot. He married Romola de Pulszky on a South American tour in 1913; Diaghilev dismissed him by telegram, and the career effectively ended. He was interned in Hungary during the war, danced publicly for the last time in 1919, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty-nine. He wrote a diary over six weeks before his confinement that is one of the strangest documents in the literature of art and illness. He died in London in 1950 and was reburied in Paris. His sister Bronislava Nijinska became a significant choreographer in her own right. The diary was published in a censored version by his widow in 1936 and unexpurgated only in 1995. Faune has been reconstructed from his own notation and is danced today.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history