17 August 1913

Teatro della Pergola

Teddy Craig, Direttore

Qualcosa bolle, Firenze

Ted, I’m doing my level best but the dances are coming out all wrong. Dance is a transient art and I am sleeping under its bridges. Consider my staging for Jeux the bum rush:

Deux enfants! Deux faunes! C’est Jeux. Fine linen skirts, rackets strung to humming. The world truncates at the edge of the stage in a haze of electric light. In the performance of fantasy one can fill the seats with whomever they choose, and so a group of precious friends shuffle programs as the curtains rise.

Lights on me, dressed and styled as Nijinsky, sui generis, heart pounding over stalk-strong legs. My disguise is of a working man with short pants belted, shirt tucked broad into the waist. The luxury of leaping strength! The thigh’s coiled spring! I am a wolf wearing the skin of a wolf.

The children don’t fit their costumes. Deirdre holds her long skirt up in fistfuls at her waist while Patrick toddles along behind, tripping over himself like an old man in pajamas. Because there is no costumer but my own memory, I can only blame myself; they are so large in my mind, so perfect. I remember the time a wasp landed on the back of Patrick’s hand, I caught and crushed it between my fingers before even thinking of the danger, and the barb that embedded itself in my fingertip grew to a boil within the week. But then perfection must be guarded.

(Briefly: we of course are taking some liberty with the performance, which was conceived to be expressed in the bodies of three men, a sensual portrait. Nijinsky wanted the discomfort of held poses to heighten a sense of danger just off stage. The last time he and I spoke he turned a book in his hand over and over as if he was doing a magic trick, that a scroll might fall from the spine detailing the route to a hidden glen in which, under a pile of half-scorched kindling, we might find the location of his truest self. In the course of production this secret garden was paved over, two of his beautiful men became women, the aeroplane that was supposed to crash onto the stage at the end of the third act made a lengthy and confounding transformation into a tennis ball tossed by a member of the crew, whose hand in turn became the hand of God, évidemment. He had his dancers scatter as if the ball were the wrenching metal of his fantasy, and it all must have looked very funny but then compromise always does.)

The children fumble through their pliés and port de bras. My power coiled and masquerading draws strength from the assembled as I breathe into the engine of my solar plexus, warming the heart and gut as if my organs are gathered around a fire, embered ribs forging a fulcrum point. This is a play of human spirit, real and present, a foundation laid at the perimeter of light, a wall against the barren world.

When I finally come to move, I bring this power and bear them with it. As I lift the children onto my shoulders, we become a towering figure of ideal love, a pillar that cannot be touched by any hand of God or man or passing time. Let the water come.