Man as Beast: Nijinsky's Faun

Abstract

"Man as Beast: Nijinsky's Faun": Nijinsky's choreography of and performance in the modernist ballet Afternoon of a Faun (1912) caused an uproar when, with piebald leotard, pointy ears, and an erect tail that seemed to stand in for what the fig leaves covering his genitals at once signaled and concealed, Nijinsky as the mythical half-human/half-animal Faun seemed to engage sexually with a scarf left behind by a fleeing nymph. In his previous work with the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky had been crucial to the revitalization of the role of the male dancer in early-twentieth-century ballet, but the controversy that his first choreographic work generated suggests that Afternoon of a Faun constituted a transformational moment in the representation of male sexuality. This essay will consider how the narrative structure of Afternoon of a Faun intersected with its innovative choreographic style to stage, through the human/non-human figure of the Faun, a male sexual animal that was at once non-masculine yet non-effeminate. This queerly ambiguous figure constituted a modernist challenge to hegemonic ideologies of sex and gender and thus contributed to the early twentieth-century formation of alternative sexual identities, but the challenge that the ballet originally posed has since been obscured as Nijinsky and the Faun have become pathologically fused in popular cultural and critical discourse. This analysis of the choreography, performance, and reception of Afternoon of a Faun thus serves as a case study of how modernist performance practice disrupted normative sex and gender roles and, in doing so, participated in the development of, and fueled the circulation of discourse about, emergent sexual identities.

The images of the russian ballet in the Fine Arts of the late XIX and early XX century

“…Other publications characterize the era of the Silver Age and the activities of the enterprise of S. Dyagilev (Bukina, 2014;Katysheva, 2018;Dolgova, 2017;Järvinen, 2010;Järvinen, 2008;Krasavchenko, 2019;Mildon, 2013;Rabinowitz, 2009), the sphere of artistic design of ballets is casually affected only in some books (Scheyen, 2017;Fedorovsky, 2003;Pritchard and Marsh, 2013;Pritchard, 2009). The "borderline" concepts of art synthesis characteristic of this time are covered in articles by a number of authors (Azizyan, 2006;Butsan, 2012;Kiseeva, 2012).Interesting material can be gathered from publications analyzing individual performances and performance skills of ballet dancers (Charles, 1988;Farfan, 2008;Veroli, 2014). In the specified period, Russian ballet was part of the problem field of world art, occupying a leading place.…”

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“…15 I was surprised that the figure of Nijinsky still seems to elicit such an emotional response, and I have found Kevin Kopelson's The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinksy helpful in understanding that phenomenon. See also Penny Farfan (2008). 16 I borrow the term 'bricolage' from anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who uses it to refer to the way different cultures recycle elements of mythology.…”

Climax as Orgasm: On Debussy’s ‘L’isle Joyeuse’

“…Here, the most salient climax intervenes less than half the way through the piece (bars 44-46) whereas a calmer, syntactic climax due to 'motivic compression' can be identified at bars 93-95, still more than a minute before the end 148. Needless to say, this doesn't make of Prélude an asexual piece; indeed, partly thanks to Nijinsky's 1912 performance, it is one of the most eroticized pieces of all music history 149. The three Nocturnes (1897-9) do not end with climactic closures either.…”