NIJINSKY'S GHOST FLOATS THROUGH ROME.

NIJINSKY'S GHOST FLOATS THROUGH ROME ROME OPERA BALLET TEATRO DELL'OPERA DI ROMA ROME, ITALY MARCH 30-APRIL 8, 2001

Like Jim Morrison and Bruce Lee, Vaslav Nijinsky's enigmatic legend only seems to ripen as his living presence recedes into the past. (He died in London April 8, 1950.) But a comprehensive exhibition of Nijinsky memorabilia that toured Europe last year, and which may reach the U.S. in the future, did much to separate the man and the myth (see "Vaslav Nijinsky," Dance Magazine, July 2000, page 44).

The European museum showings also helped spark an ongoing international Nijinsky renaissance that has included two new French documentaries, two gallery showings of recent interpretive artwork, the premiere of John Neumeier's Nijinsky, at least five plays, two feature film projects, and a set of international dance awards (the inaugural Nijinsky Awards, culminating the first-ever Monaco Danses Dances Forum held last December in Monte Carlo). At Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, the Rome Opera Ballet added another event commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Nijinsky's death. Thanks to the vision of the new artistic director, Carla Fracci, and her husband, Beppe Menegatti (who knew the Russian star's wife, Romola), it became the first professional ballet company to dedicate an entire program to reconstructions of all three "lost" Nijinsky works.

There is no evidence that the legendary dancer ever contemplated a joint presentation of Le Sacre du printemps, Jeux, and Till Eulenspiegel. But Nijinsky Ritrovato (Nijinsky Revisited) demonstrated how the Russian choreographer might have filled a whole evening with an engaging mix of political tragi-comedy, troubled romance, and deathly drama.

The husband-and-wife team of choreographer Millicent Hodson and art historian Kenneth Archer created all three reconstructions, starting in 1987 with the Joffrey Ballet production of Sacre. They first resurrected Till in 1994 with the Paris Opera Ballet, and Jeux in 1996 at the Opera Ballet of Verona, with Fracci as the senior woman (a role originally danced by Tamara Karsavina, the Ballets Russes star whom Fracci played in the 1980 Herbert Ross feature film Nijinsky). Six other companies have produced the Sacre reconstruction since the Joffrey, but Till had not been performed since Paris, and Jeux had only been staged once after Verona, in May 2000 at the Royal Ballet in London.

The Rome program opened with Till, a quasi-pantomimic ode to individual freedom that Nijinsky created, appropriately enough, in America in 1916 and performed twenty-three times to enthusiastic audiences during the Ballets Russes's 1916-17 U.S. tour. The title character's irreverent exposure of the hypocritical elite classes, followed by their ultimately futile retribution, remains timeless in concept. Based on abundant visual evidence, Archer's reconstruction of Robert Edmund Jones's Dr. Seuss-like 1916 sets and costumes is first-rate. Of Hodson's three resurrections of Nijinsky choreography, the eighteen-minute Till, calling for more than fifty dancers and set to Richard Strauss's 1895 tone poem of the same name, may have the least evidence to stand on.

The ballet's commonalities with commedia dell'arte made it familiar territory for the Italian interpreters. In the first cast, the happy-go-lucky Riccardo Di Cosmo, a 30-year-old Rome native with a high, supple leap, was a natural in the title role and suggested the brazen flavor of surviving photographs showing Nijinsky as the "radicalized Petrouchka." Silvia Curti was sensitively spirited as the Apple Woman, his love interest. In the second cast, Alessia Barberini was a more subtle and subdued Apple Woman. Alessandro Tiburzi, wearing the same green tights and mad shock of fake red hair (prefiguring The Riddler from Batman), was sincere, but did not prance and flit with Di Cosmo's convincing lightheartedness.

Next on the program, Fracci reprised her role from the original 1996 reconstruction of Jeux, with Royal Ballet principal Deborah Bull and Adam Cooper, a last-minute replacement for original Verona interpreter Alessandro Molin (who shattered his wrist in a recent motorcycle accident and also had to relinquish Till). Fracci's contained Italian fire balanced well with the two Brits in the strikingly modern psychological dissection of a three-way courtship, the first ballet to address contemporary life when Nijinsky created it in 1913, to Debussy's same-titled commissioned score. Bull looked right at home as the senior woman in the Royal Ballet production a year before, and here she impressed with her ability to inhabit the junior woman's highly contrasting psyche. Despite his late recruitment, the deceptively tall Cooper--who played the grown-up Billy at the end of the film Billy Elliot, and whose wife, Sarah Wildor, danced in the second London cast for Jeux--combined the best qualities of the male leads in The Royal Ballet's two casts: Bruce Sansom's precision with Inaki Urlezaga's virility.

The program's challengingly condensed rehearsal period was most evident in the tightly synchronized ensemble movement of Sacre, but the reconstruction continues to overwhelm with the volcanic force of Stravinsky's frighteningly powerful score and Nijinsky's movement showing tribal passion churning like lava. Dancing the Chosen One in the first cast, Bull took Nijinsky's turned-in position to an unusual extreme and was completely convincing as the frightened young innocent who must dance herself to death. Standing motionless with a haunting gaze for more than five full minutes before her suicidal solo, she made clear the process of dissociation that would naturally attend such a terrible fate. (Just five days later, at an AIDS benefit in Paris's Theatre du Chatelet, the surprisingly versatile Bull was tough, sexy, and utterly natural dancing barefoot to a spooky industrial beat in Wayne McGregor's Symbiont; one would enjoy seeing her do more of this kind of work.) In the second Rome cast of Sacre, Curti's high, frenzied leaps added a perfect element to the torturous closing sequence.

The exact degree of their authenticity notwithstanding, we are fortunate that the Hodson-Archer reconstructions give us a clear, though unavoidably imperfect, sense of Nijinsky's incisive vision. October 11-14 in Chicago, the Joffrey Ballet will present Jeux and Sacre together with Nijinsky's first work, L'apres-midi d'un faune, which the choreographer recorded himself using his own system of dance notation. But it remains for a leading ballet company to dare stage Faune with all three Hodson-Archer restorations, a theoretical possibility since 1996 that would create a truly historic, and perhaps even well-balanced, program.