Beijing’s winter ballet season often means a parade of substandard swans, but this month there’s a new theme in town – the descent from genius into madness. On Friday 6 January we have Boris Eifman’s Tchaikovsky; and just three weeks later, The Hamburg Ballet brings us Nijinsky, which chronicles the tumultuous life of ballet’s most iconic figure.
Choreographer John Neumeier hails originally from Milwaukee, but spent much of his career in Europe, taking up The Hamburg Ballet’s artistic director/chief choreographer post in 1973. Often dismissed as pretentious in his native land, he is lionised across the pond. Dancers shed prime roles at top ballet companies to enter his Hamburg orbit, and critics wax poetic about his dramatic expressionism, where story trumps style. His Liliom is a petty criminal who graduates to major crimes and abandons his mistress and unborn child to commit suicide, while his Little Mermaid ends up slumped in a wheelchair.
Nijinsky tells the tragic story of ballet’s most legendary superstar, who led a colourful life before succumbing to mental illness at the age of 29. A blatant bisexual given to erotic interpretations, Vaslav Nijinsky was surrounded by infidelity (father, wife) and madness (brother) while producing some of the genre’s most revolutionary works; the most famous of these being Le Sacre du Printemps, which caused a riot in Paris during its 1913 premiere.
Neumeier’s ballet takes us on a journey into the artist’s downward spiral. We see his agonised grimaces and tortured movements as we meet characters from both his reality and his imagination – the Faun, the Golden Slave, his wife, doctor and brother are all players in his tragic drama. This holiday season, Eifman and Neumeier offer you a month of madness – so skip the swans.