You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
None
This third volume in The Language of Dance series presents Nijinsky's ballet as he himself recorded it in 1915, making this authentic version, translated into Labanotation, immediately available to dance students, teachers, scholars and researchers. It intentionally includes the historical background, the chronology of Niminsky's performances of "Faune," Nijinsky's production notes, analysis of the choreographic style of the ballet, detailed study and performance notes, approaches to learning and teaching the ballet, research problems encountered in the transcription and revival, and a comprehensive explanation of Nijinsky's notation system with examples from his score. Supplemented by photographs of the 1912 production and with the music adjacent to the dance phrases, this book provides unique access to a much discussed and elusive ballet. Nijinsky's score of his "L'Apres-midi d'un faune" lay unused for nearly forty years after his death, because nobody could read it. In 1987
'He achieves the miraculous,' the sculptor Auguste Rodin wrote of dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'He embodies all the beauty of classical frescoes and statues'. Like so many since, Rodin recognised that in Nijinsky classical ballet had one of the greatest and most original artists of the twentieth century, in any genre. Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, he had a powerful sponsor in Sergei Diaghilev - until a dramatic and public failure ended his career and set him on a route to madness. As a dancer, he was acclaimed as godlike for his extraordinary grace and elevation, but the opening of Stravinsky's The Rite...
It was there that on the stage of a theatre for me undistinguishable-through a mass of unimportant plasterwork-from an esplanade of the forest, I saw for the first and last time, Nijinsky. We had already reached the third year of the war; he himself had just escaped from a concentration camp, and for me, the acute accents of the little orchestra which under Ansermet's baton was addressing the backcloth through the curtain wave mingled simultaneously on that strange Antarctic shore, with the noise of the! ocean flinging its prodigious fireworks against the breakwater of Beira Mar, and that of the ever present cannonade over there. l was like someone who is about to enter a ballroom from the outside, throws his cigar one way, and casts a final glance the other way towards the horizon where a dreadful moon is spreading its blaze behind a curtain of poisoned vapours. The storm had thrown up between Capocabana and the Sugarloaf the gaily-painted vessel of the Russian Ballets, and I was invited to take my ticket like those one-time emigrants going to applaud some exile from the Royal Opera on a chance stage of Coblenz or Spa. Nijinsky appeared. Romola Nijiski