Nijinski - Ballet Zurich

Only ten glorious years were granted Vaslav Nijinsky at the head of Sergei Diaghilev’s legendary Ballets Russes. He intoxicated audiences – with virtuoso leaps and androgynous charisma – as the Faun and the Golden Slave. His audacious choreographies provoked scandals. He loved a man and married a woman. The dancer fell at the pinnacle of his fame. Before he died in London in 1950, he had spent thirty deranged years in the shadows of mental asylums. Compulsory admission to a psychiatric clinic, dubious diagnoses and experimental therapies drove his soul beyond the reach of others.

Marco Goecke has dedicated a feature-length ballet to this epoch-making dancer and choreographer. The result fascinatingly merges Goecke’s distinctive, nervously trembling, frantic body language with reminiscences of Nijinsky the artist. This also allows for choreographic elements of his career as a dancer to be incorporated. The choreography focuses on Nijinsky the man and his character, transposing emotions into highly aesthetic movement. Although Marco Goecke accompanies the exceptional artist through the stages of his life, the piece extends far beyond a purely biographical study, and focuses on fundamental questions. The magic and value of art takes centre stage – but also the price that it intransigently exacts from all creative people.

After Deer Vision and Petrushka, Marco Goecke will once again be a guest of Zurich Ballet to develop a new, extended version of his Nijinski ballet with the ensemble. The original was premièred at the Theaterhaus Stuttgart’s Gauthier Dance festival to great acclaim.

Together with Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Frédéric Chopin’s two piano concertos – played by the Swiss pianist Adrian Oetiker – will form the musical framework of this moving evening. Pavel Baleff will conduct the Philharmonia Zurich.

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