BALLET REVIEW: NIJINSKY


Pictured: Guillaume Côté

JOHN COULBOURN, Special to TorSun
03 MARCH 2013
R: 5/5

TORONTO - Long before Côté and Antonijevic, before Harrington and Augustyn, Baryshnikov and Nureyev, there was Nijinsky. And while great and memorable male dancers would emerge whether or not Nijinsky had existed, when it comes to men in ballet, it is nonetheless a memory of Nijinsky that still serves as yardstick by which great dancing is measured.

That said, a man dead for more than 60 years — a man who hadn’t danced publicly for 30 years before that — risks becoming more a memory than a man in the world of classical dance. Imagine measuring yourself against a ghost. So in 2000, choreographer John Neumeier created a new full length ballet that examined the triumphs and tragedies that marked the life of this dance legend — a complex, often compelling work titled simply NIJINSKY, which did much to flesh out his fading memory. NIJINSKY was welcomed into the repertoire of the National Ballet of Canada Saturday at the Four Seasons Centre, by an appreciative and enthusiastic audience.


In the main, this is a work that eschews conventional biographical detail in favour of the turbulent emotional landscape that shaped and ultimately consumed the great man’s career. It starts in the ballroom of the Switzerland’s Suvretta House Hotel, circa 1919, as a crowd gathers for what proves to be the final public performance of Vaslav Nijinsky, danced with barely-controlled abandon by Guillaume Côté.


As he enters the room, the dancer sees — or thinks he sees — impresario Serge Diaghilev (Jiří Jelinek), his one-time lover and founder of the famed Ballet Russes. Already mentally fragile, the appearance of the man who played a major role in both his personal and private life pushes Nijinsky over the edge and, while personal and professional ghosts frolic, he descends slowly and inexorably into the madness that will mark the rest of his days.


In NIJINSKY, not surprisingly, Neumeier showcases a company’s finest male dancers, with Dylan Tedaldi, Brett van Sickle, Naoya Ebe, Aleksandar Antonijevic and Keiichi Hirano joining Côté and Jelinek, fleshing out roles ranging from Nijinsky’s tragic brother, Stansilav (Tedaldi in a memorable turn) through to some of the more famous characters Nijinsky created — Schéhérazade’s Golden Slave and the title characters from L’Après-midi d’un faune and Petruschka, to name a few.


In addition, in a breathtaking and ultimately visually and emotionally exhausting two hours, Neumeier also mines the riches of the company’s distaff, drawing fine performances from Heather Ogden (as the dancer’s wife), Xiao Nan Yu (his mother), Sonja Rodriguez and a host of others, cocooning it all in colour-drenched sets of his own design (exquisitely lit by Ralf Merkel) and setting things soaring on the wings of music by Chopin, Schumann, Rimskij-Korsakov and Shostakovich.
It is, in the main, delicious, complex stuff, and if, in the final quarter hour, as things career ever more out of control, one finds oneself longing for at least a semblance of sanity, it is all the easier to imagine how Nijinsky must have felt.