British new-music maestro Rolf Hind and Norman Allen's stageplay about the great ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in today's reviews.
Gay Theatre Festival: Nijinsky's Last Dance
Project Cube
IT SADDLES the soul to know that someone who spent his life shunning gravity (which he called "the tool of the devil") should end his years grounded in an asylum, battling his own demons. Such was the fate of Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the most outstanding ballet dancers of all time, whose years of daring innovation, rampant egomania and occasional hedonism concluded with an unconquerable schizophrenia.
As though railing against that fate, Workshop Theatre Group's production of Norman Allen's 1998 play is almost coy about the setting for this monologue, suggesting the Swiss sanatorium with flowing strips of white linen, like the trailing straps of an unfastened straitjacket.
When Nijinsky proclaims himself "the Son of God", then later settles for "the great Nijinsky", he makes it sound like only a minor demotion. Although performer Ricardo Melendez is himself an accomplished dancer, the part calls for relatively little balletic display, his wild-eyed brio invested more in conjuring the biographical path from retiring stripling to lord of the dance.
That journey, guided by the amorous attentions of first Prince Lvov, then the Ballet Russe's impresario Sergei Diaghelev, casts Nijinsky less as driven artist than multi-purpose muse. Under Diaghelev, he is encouraged to retrieve the spotlight from the ballerinas, while the artist Rodin later fetishises his naked form. That's fine by Nijinsky, who is largely portrayed as a sensualist, moving giddily between the embraces of men, women and - with much greater dependence - the audience.
Melendez does a fine job delineating his various characters, filtering each through Nijinsky's often-caustic impersonations.
Meanwhile, major life events are shared as afterthoughts: "Oh, I had a daughter." With the Russian revolution heavy in the background, Allen presents the artistic imagination as no less revolutionary. Inevitably, despite the performance's best efforts, it is hard to satisfactorily plumb his genius, to understand the mind behind such grace and beauty. Or, as Yeats asked, how can we know the dancer from the dance?
Until tonight.
PETER CRAWLEY
Rolf Hind (piano)
Printing House, TCD, Dublin
WHETHER HE was treating the piano as a horizontal harp, as an anthropomorphic stage prop, or as a vehicle for complex jangling fantasies, British new-music maestro Rolf Hind made a series of indelible impressions.
He opened with his own Cloud Shadowand Solgata, two sparse pieces that toy with sets of artificially transformed notes. The first makes much of a dull thud, suggesting an unplugged electric bass guitar, the second reverses the piano principle with a sound that grows rather than decays.
In Ninnananna and Tangata Manu, two modules from Marco Stroppa's Miniature Estrose(1991-95), novel effects were achieved by more official means. An unheard metachord, suspended by sostenuto pedal, added a halo of resonance to soft tremolandos, sudden squalls and scintillating arabesques.
Two local references were provided by the tense and exhilarating Flux(from Reflux, 1994-2007) by Belfast-based composer Simon Mawhinney, and the keyboardless impression Banshee(1925) by Henry Cowell.
Further stretching the relationship between pianist and piano was Claudia Molitor's Tango(2004), where the performer engages the instrument in a comically one-sided courtship ritual.
Hind declared a special affection for the most harmonious piece in the programme, Per Nørgärd's Turn(1973). Though his advocacy of this beguiling preludial work bordered on the aggressive, there was persuasive subtlety to the graduated texture, harmony and dynamics, and to some unfulfilled allusions to Bach.
Until the final item, this concert admitted only sporadic glimpses of Hind's astonishing powers of assimilation and execution. With Chris Dench's Tilt(1985), however, came a deluge of gobsmacking pianistic prowess.
ANDREW JOHNSTONE
