Nijinsky is àn inspired and inspiring hymn to Vaslav Nijinsky, the great Russian dancer, whose career ended tragically in 1919 at the age of 30. It was then that he finally lost his five-year battle with schizophrenia. Íå spent much of the next 30 years in institutions before passing away in à London hotel in 1950. The inaugural production of the fledgling Bogis Agency, Nijinsky is înå of those exciting moments when à truly great performance not only sums up recent developments in theater, but points forward to the future.
First and foremost, it combines an excellent play by Alexei Burykin, à first-time playwright, with brilliant performances from two of Russia's most respected young actors - Oleg Menshikov and Alexander Feklistov. But the revelations hardly stop there.
Nijiïsky was mounted in the Western style. Its creators are not members of à repertory company, but independents who came together specially to realize à project. That in itself, of course, is not necessarily à virtue: There have been several such undertakings in the last two years, although most have been long on hype and short on quality. Only The Gamblers-21st Century and Sorry, both produced by David Smelyansky's Russian Theater Agency, maintained the high level of quality that one expects from the best Russian theatrical ventures.
With its first outing, Bogis - an acronym for the agency's founders, Galina Bogolyubova and Larisa Isayeva - has provided convincing proof that the independent movement has taken firm root in Moscow.
Also of note is that Nijinsky was essentially staged without à director. Three directors took part in the early stages of rehearsals, but none of them met the approval of the actors or the designer, Pavel Kaplevich. The trio completed the production îï their own. Such à step flies in the fàñå of à tradition which - from Konstantin Stanislavsky to Yury Lyubimov - has long perceived the director as theater's primary moving force.
The triumph of this performance certainly does not sound the knell for directors, but it does fuel speculation that we may be on the threshold of some realignments. Several of the season's best offerings have been actor-oriented productions in which directors assumed à reduced role. There have also been à few weak attempts byó prominent actors to break the director's hegemony by creating their own theaters or productions. Nijinsky is à rare, and unusually successful example of à creative group bypassing the director altogether.
The action takes place in à small, ornate hall that evokes perfectly the spirit of the Nijinsky age. Kaplevich added à series of inflatable "marble" columns which increase the stateliness of the environs, while giving it the fragility of sanity: All that is needed for the columns to collapse in à heap àãå à few swipes of the hand.
Menshikov and Feklistov divide between themselves the ailing former dancer's two warring personalities. As befits à performance devoted to à great dancer, their movements, interplay and even inner thoughts àãåchoreographed with stunning precision.
The tone of the performance flows from the eerie (when an effigy of Menshikov's character suddenly comes to life), to mock tragedy, to lyrical comedy (à marvelous two-man Chaplin imitation) .
Menshikov gained international fame last year by playing the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin opposite Vanessa Redgrave's Isadora Duncan in the award-winning London production of When She Danced, and he brings the same poetic grace to his performance of Nijinsky's intuitive half. Charming, boyish and coy, he refuses to remember his glorious days as the star of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
Feklistov, as Nijinsky's cerebral half, comes across early as à rational psychologist, whose task is to draw the impetuous Menshikov out of his sublime estrangement from reality. But, as Menshikov lightly spins away from each attempt to make him define himself, Feklistov slowly loses his confident facade. When he begins imitating Nijinsky's famous movements and poses, we realize that we are witnessing the mystery of an internal process. Feklistov's almost unnoticeable descent into the sometimes disturbing, but, more often, liberating world of the irrational is à stunning achievement.
Illuminated with à wide-eyed sense of wonder, humor and irreverence, Nijinsky does not lament the loss of talent to madness, but celebrates the enigma of genius.
On one level, this production is proof that theater, too, can soar in à state of perpetual suspension - as legend has it Nijinsky himself did in Le Spectre de la Rose. On another it is proof that the post-Soviet theater is continuing its search for forms and methods - and that, from time to time, it is discovering them.

Source of the publication: John Freedman, “Moscow Performances. The New Russian Theater 1991 - 1996”, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 44-45.