ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of Vaslav Nijinsky as a dancer and choreographer and examines the shift in ideas about the male dancer to which he contributed while a star of Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes. It traces changing ideas about Nijinsky's dancing from positive contemporary reviews to hostile reminiscences by people unsympathetic to his choreographic innovations, and to the revival of interest in his work by dance scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It places Diaghilev and Nijinsky within the gay culture of their time, and locates the ballets of Les Ballets Russes in relation to European ideas about Russians as Orientals. This provides a context for examining the critical reception of Nijinsky's dancing in ballets created for him by Michel Fokine and the way that Nijinsky appeared to have deliberately troubled and subverted the qualities of manliness and gracefulness for which he had been admired. Through an examination of representations of masculinity in Fokine's ballets and in Nijinsky's own, more experimental choreography, it argues that Nijinsky's modernism opened up new spaces for choreographers to explore emergent modern sexualities.
