ABSTRACT
Vaslav Nijinsky is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest male ballet dancers of all time. Between the ages of 18 and 28 he enjoyed a spectacularly colourful and successful career as principal dancer in the Ballets Russes, which had been recently founded by the impresario Serge Diaghilev. During these ten years he achieved world fame as a dancer and choreographer, introducing an original system of choreography and composing several ballets. The first ballets, Jeux and Afternoon of a Faun (to the music of Debussy) and The Rite of Spring (to Stravinsky’s music), were so foreign to tradition that they caused uproar when first performed, and Debussy and Stravinsky at first thoroughly disliked them. Dancers, trained in the traditional academic style, found it hard to adapt to his spectacular innovations, which often required them to dance in an aggressive, even violent and erotic manner. Their task was made even more difficult by Nijinsky’s obvious lack of empathy and poor communication skills. Ever since his adolescence he had shown traits of extreme introspectiveness, aloofness and instability of mood.
