Opening Today: THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T (or THE NIJINSKY INCANTATION)
It's 4:45am. I can't sleep. I've slept, but I can't fall back asleep. In a couple hours I'll head to Cleveland Public Theatre to begin a work that started eight or nine years ago as an image that came after watching Nureyev dance Nijinsky's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.
On January 19, 1919, ballet great Vaslav Nijinsky gave his final public performance, Wedding with God. At 5pm in the ballroom of Suvretta House in St. Moritz, Switzerland, he entered, stood, and eventually spoke the words, “Now I will dance the war, the war which you did not prevent and are also responsible for.” A pianist played Chopin’s Prelude for Piano, Op. 28: No. 20 in C Minor while #Nijinsky waited for God to move him. He improvised his response to World War I. He'd been cut off from his life at the Ballets Russes. His lover, caretaker, and employer, Serge Diaghilev, fired him when he got married. He was married to a woman who wanted the conquest of "Nijinsky" and did not know how to love the person. He'd seen terrible things during the war. He experienced a two year imprisonment at his in-laws' home, unable to dance or move as he was accustomed; a political prisoner forced to report to the police once a week. He felt people had not done enough to stop the war. His dance was his feelings. Always his feelings.
This same day, he also began a diary that charted his mental state over the next three months, at the end of which he was institutionalized for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia. He spent the next thirty years in and out of institutions, never to dance publicly again. I feel compassion and understanding when I read his diary. It is not the words of a madman, but an artist, a walking bleeding soul, who felt deeply about everything around him, and had been cut off from the only way he knew how to fully express himself: through movement. What he put into words in his diary can only be interpreted through feeling them. He felt the answer to the carnage of the time was a return to feeling. That diary has heavily influenced my work.
On January 19, 2025 at 11am, 106 years to the moment that Nijinsky’s final performance began, in the midst of war, uncertainty, and sociopolitical upheaval, I'll begin THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T (or THE NIJINSKY INCANTATION). I'm so grateful that CPT is allowing this work to open at this very moment. We planned to schedule the work around mid-January, and when I discovered the synchronicity of timing, Raymond Bobgan said Yes. That I get -- we get -- to feel what happened 106 years prior, and begin, together, from that. I'm grateful to be giving Nijinsky life again at the time his public life, his 10 year professional career in which he changed the world of dance, came to a close.
This work is born from the text I wrote on my studio wall during my 18-month pandemic lockdown. It's interpreted completely anew in this piece. Completely anew. Every moment, completely anew. The space filled with art, completely new. Where do I end? Where does Nijinsky begin? Where do you begin?
I don't know what will happen at 11am today when this durational performance opens to you. I know @instaschawbs and I have created a space filled with art, pulsing with atmosphere and feeling. The performance has already begun in so many ways. The space is already alive. All you have to do is show up at Cleveland Public Theatre. No online reservations. You're welcome to stay the full three hours of each performance, but you may absolutely come and go as you wish. You may come and go as you wish during the course of each performance over the next week.
A lot is changing in the world this week. The space will be an exploration, a record of that. A record of feeling during this time.
It's 5:34am. Maybe I'll sleep.