When the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky — written in 1919 just before he was committed to a Zurich sanatorium — were first published in 1936, the writer Henry Miller praised them as “a communication so naked, so desperate, that it breaks the mold. We are face to face with reality, and it is almost unbearable…had he not gone to the asylum we would have had in Nijinsky a writer equal to the dancer.”It’s not difficult to see why the fragmented entries of the diary by the legendary dancer and choreographer of the early 20th century attracted the attention of experimental director Robert Wilson and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov. The artists, who frequently collaborate, have come up with “Letter to a Man,” an astonishing work based on the diary which had its world premiere at the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds in Italy last summer and which played the Brooklyn Academy of Music last month. If you missed it there, “Letter to a Man” will be at Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA in Los Angeles on November 18th following a November 10th performance in Berkeley, California. Then the 75-minute piece will be in Paris’s Espace Pierre Cardin from December 15th to January 21, 2017.The “man” in the title is Serge Diaghilev, the flamboyant impresario who discovered the 19-year-old Nijinsky at the famed Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and made him the lead dancer of his internationally famous Ballets Russes. The producer also made Nijinsky his lover, promoting him not only as a dancer but as a choreographer. His ballets “Afternoon of a Faun” with music by Claude Debussy and “The Rite of Spring” with a score by Igor Stravinsky were controversial sensations when they premiered in 1912 and 1913, respectively.Those glories were far in the past when in 1919 Nijinsky began writing in his diary paranoid imaginings of bloody footprints in the snow, delusions of grandeur, guilt-ridden disgust with sex, meditations on God, and ruminations about his former lover and mentor Diaghilev. The producer by that time had abandoned his one-time protégé after Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky, an Hungarian aristocrat and obsessive fan.The dancer wrote only for about six weeks, curtailed by his admission into the Zurich mental institution—a descent into madness that would cause him to be in and out of asylums until his death in 1950. Playwrights and filmmakers have long been fascinated by the melodrama of his life but few have succeeded in rendering it. Madness is exceedingly hard to capture in linear form. Director Herbert Ross’s 1980 movie misfire, “Nijinsky,” which starred George de la Pena in the title role, came up short. But, as dance critic Joan Acocella described in a New Yorker piece, melodrama was far from the mind of Wilson when he began developing “Letter to a Man” with Baryshnikov. “He belongs to the nonrealist, nonnarrative, visionary strain in modern theater,” she wrote of the director, “the line stretching from Wagner down through the Symbolists and the Surrealists. (In 1971, when Wilson first showed his work in Paris, Louis Aragon, a surviving surrealist, wrote that he was “the future we predicted.”)True to form, “Letter to a Man” is a series of non-related scenes and tableaus--“a vaudeville show” is how Acocella describes it—that plunge the viewer into a forbidding and disturbing dreamscape, punctuated with surprising moments. Moving into view are bright cartoon cutouts of a little girl and a chicken, a miniature boat with man whose hat suddenly flies off, a murky, icy landscape with indistinguishable objects agitating like bugs. For the most part, Baryshnikov is in whiteface, dressed in a tuxedo and only dancing, briefly, framed within a red-curtained proscenium to snatches of pop tunes.What emerges is an astringent portrait of a mad man, most moving in his fumbling digressions about his relationship with God, sex and despair. “I am standing in front of a precipice into which I may fall,” an offstage voice intones at one point. “I am afraid to fall.” Nijinsky’s fears, expressed in his diary, were well-founded. But Wilson and Baryshnikov have transubstantiated those tortured meanderings into art. And if you should be lucky enough to catch the show in Paris this winter, perhaps a visit to the dancer’s grave might be in order afterwards. His tomb is in Montmartre Cemetery, decorated with a statue depicting the dancer in one of his most famous role, the puppet Petrushka. Nijinsky, at peace at last.
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