Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury Ballet: Reconstruction of the Dance and Design for Jeux (review)

At the end of her book on the reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Jeux (1913), Millicent Hodson revisits her search for documentation of the lost ballet, a search that continued even after the project’s premiere, in Verona in 1996. At last Hodson located a score of the Claude Debussy music with Nijinsky’s annotations. Once the choreographer’s notes were translated and minutely matched to her reconstruction score, Hodson decided they yielded less choreographic information than what she’d already collected. They’d been made at an early stage in Nijinsky’s own choreographic process and gave few clues to his eventual “sculpted and contained” movement vocabulary. Not that the discovery of these notes wasn’t significant. Indeed, says Hodson, they prove that history is an unfinished affair.

That affair has occupied Hodson and her partner, designer and art historian Kenneth Archer, for more than two decades. Since 1987 Hodson has been recovering lost ballets from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. In the process, with Jeux, Le Sacre du Printemps, and Tyl Eulenspiegel, Hodson has constructed an artistic profile of an almost mythological figure in ballet history. As dancer, choreographic prodigy, and vortex of successive scandals, Nijinsky today is defined by contemporary accounts, later recollections of his associates, and posthumous claims by aesthetic arbiters who never saw his work. Hodson agrees with the assessment of him as a major creative force, a forerunner if not a direct instigator of contemporary ballet. But her efforts to provide us with living evidence, supported by exhaustive research, have touched off their own controversy. Nijinsky avatars have dismissed Hodson’s reconstructions with skepticism and sometimes indignation, while audiences worldwide greet the ballets appreciatively.

I can’t evaluate the historical authenticity of Hodson’s Nijinsky ballets, but I don’t think authenticity is the crucial issue. We may never be able to identify every original step. I believe that level of accuracy is of concern only to those who monitor dance in the studio. The audience is much less discriminating. What has intrigued and inspired me about all eight Hodson recoveries that I’ve seen is how displaced they are from whatever is taking place on contemporary stages. In any recovered piece we want to see a convincing stage work, with an atmosphere, a look, an idea about performing, that evokes another sensibility. Hodson’s reconstructions may be simulacra of the original ballets, but so are the third-and fourth-generation hand-medowns that are deemed canonical by the ballet establishment.

Nijinsky’s Bloomsbury Ballet is a companion book to Hodson’s documentation of her Sacre du Printemps reconstruction, Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace (Pendragon, 1996). Both books constitute a defense of sorts. With music notation, verbal narrative, and visual illustration, Hodson created a layered score for each dance. Published, the scores account for what she’s put on the stage and reveal the open-spirited way she works toward reinstating a choreographer’s intentions. Different ballets have evoked different methodologies, as the two books testify.

For Sacre Marie Rambert, Nijinsky’s assistant, and the composer, Igor Stravinsky, left very explicit notes, giving steps, rhythms, and accents assigned to particular dancers in the huge cast, often bar by bar, in two musical scores. For instance, within a single measure in Act II Scene 2, Rambert writes: “A desperate leap with bent knees and tight fists.” Hodson also had sketchbooks drawn consecutively during performances by Valentine Gross-Hugo, which gave her body shapes and some additional information about dynamics. After an introductory essay, Hodson’s Sacre score comprises two hundred pages of music, with her descriptive notes, drawings, and source information inserted beneath.

Jeux premiered the same season as Le Sacre and was overshadowed by that bombshell ballet. Altogether smaller, sparer, and less ambitious, it was casually recorded. Even following the usual trail of secondary sources—interviews, critical responses, and other published materials—there was far less to go...