Dancing on the edge

Imagine a timeline in which Picasso has packed up his easel before Cubism? Or a version of the world in which the Parisians went ahead with the plan to dismantle that incongruent tower of metal struts? What about a timeline where James Joyce just gave up on Ulysses? 

Could we envisage a reality without these milestones of modernism, touchstones of that almost miraculous period in the arts that came to define the beginning of the 20th century?

Very much in that vein would be a world without Vaslav Nijinsky, the first superstar of ballet, the greatest male dancer of that time, as celebrated for a physicality that seemed to break the bonds of gravity as for his characterisations of uncharted depth and theatricality.

Nijinsky’s choreography of new and original ballets stunned and polarised. The sexual suggestiveness of Faune reputedly divided the audience to the extent of a brawl between Njinsky’s delirious devotees and his outraged deriders. 

Yet this supernova would succumb to schizophrenia. When he died in 1950, aged 61, he had spent much of the previous three decades in institutions. 

From April 4, after a critically lauded and popular season in Melbourne, The Australian Ballet stages John Neumeier’s ‘biography of the soul’ Nijinsky in Sydney – 75 years after Nijinsky passed. 

Callum Linnane is in the title part for the second time, having performed it for The Australian Ballet nine years ago as a 21-year-old. 

“It’s the butterfly effect,” Linnane says of Nijinsky. “I think it can be argued that if we remove Nijinsky from history, dance could have taken a completely different trajectory. The work he was doing choreographically was so avant-garde, so pushing of the boundaries, that he really gave birth to a different form of creating dance.”

A Ballarat boy, Linnane’s study of dance commenced at just seven years of age. He joined The Australian Ballet in 2015 and been principal artist since 2022.

If Nijinsky the piece has been pivotal to him, so has Nijinsky the artist.

“As a dancer now, even if I’m not consciously aware of it, I feel his influence,” Linnane says. “I’m a ballet dancer, classically trained … but the dance I can most relate to would be more modern stuff than the older classical stuff. To be honest with you, I find some of the older stuff to be bit of bore. So, the influence there is that without Nijinsky there might be no modern dance. 

“So that affects me every day. And, of course, he was the first male dance superstar. Maybe if there had been no Nijinsky, there may not have been Rudolf Nureyev, there may not have been a Mikhael Baryshnikov.”

Nijinsky was a major piece and a breakthrough part for Linnane almost a decade ago. In having the chance to reprise the role now, Linnane can assess the changes in himself and in his relationship to the piece and part. 

“It’s absolutely changed,” he said “When I first got cast, I was 20 and 21 when I performed it. I was really young and it was a large undertaking, one I was desperate to do. I gave it my best shot, but a lot of focus, without my meaning it to be, was ‘Oh, my God, I’m doing the lead role. How am I going to do it?’ 

“So there was the pressure of leading the company and being a young dancer – is he good enough? Being worried about others’ opinions. 

“Because I’ve now been doing principal parts for a few years, I think the focus now could be a little more pure in a way. This time around I knew I could do it, so it was about how honest and true I could be in the role. When I was younger, I feel a lot more of my portrayal was projecting that ‘I can show you how dramatic I can be, that I can play a character who loses their mind.’

“So if my performance now is more insular, I would like to think that a more honest and true portrayal comes with that.”

In its review of the Melbourne season of Nijinsky, The Guardian writes that Linnane possesses an ‘intensity of purpose and emotional ranges that brings Hamlet to mind’.

‘Linnane’s is a singular talent at the height of its power’.

John Neumeier has said that he wanted to craft not so much a biography in dance that ticks off the chronological milestones, rather an exploration of artistic heights suffused by Nijinsky’s emotional and psychological travails. 

Can dance, with its theatricality and physicality, tell a deeper biographical truth? 

“I think it can,” Linnane says “I love reading biographies about people I have no idea of. I find that fascinating. I like the idea of the biographical anyway. But it’s difficult to answer because dance is so much a part of my life … the ballet Nijinsky is biographical, but it doesn’t follow a linear chronology. 

“John calls it more a ‘biography of the soul.’ And I think dance is the way into that world and can show that better than any other art. There can be a sense of ambiguity to dance. Who decides what a movement means? It can mean many things. Who decides its meaning. No-one. Especially in John’s choreographical language and theatrical language. In the way he designs sets, there is such a sense of poetry and ambiguity that it speaks volumes. It transcends a few dot points on a page. To read Nijinsky’s story, it is already a rich tapestry, the highest of the highs, the lowest of the lows, beauty and tragedy at the same time. 

“I think dance and music is the perfect medium to show his life.”

You will by now have formed the impression that Nijinsky ain’t Swan Lake, that the decorous formality of traditional ballet is not its thing. And that excites Linnane as much today as it did almost a decade ago.

“I think everyone contains so much,’ he says. “In the case of Nijinsky, triumph and tragedy cohabitates. It’s the same with genius and madness, it’s dancing on a knife’s edge.”

“I would love this production to open up peoples’ minds about dance. Sometimes people want to watch a show and be entertained or moved. They want to see something they can follow really easily.”

“I think that’s too easy. People should be more open to ambiguity and the sense and idea of poetry and dance. I would like people to take away that this preconceived idea of what dance is, that it can be disrupted, it can open your eyes to being moved by a structure or type of show that was not perhaps what they thought was in store.

“Everyone on this production, no matter the role, is so committed and being onstage among that kind if energy is an incredible thing. What I would love to hear that, whether people like it or not, they were brought along on that journey, they felt the honesty and truth about what was on stage in front of them.”

The Australian Ballet’s Sydney season of Nijinsky runs from April 4th until April 22nd at the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House.