Modernism, Masculinity and Sexuality in Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune

Abstract

The ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune, created by Vaslav Nijinsky and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1912, was set to Claude Debussy’s Prélude: L’Après-midi d’un faune of 1894 that was itself inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s poem of 1876. Mallarmé and Debussy were key figures in the symbolist movement who are recognised as precursors of artistic modernism in the way their works broke through existing conventions to open up what were then new aesthetic and ideological possibilities. Thus Mallarmé’s poem initiated radically new, deconstructive poetic practices, while Debussy’s Prélude instigated a new, post-Wagnerian musical idiom. Although the ballet, through its collaborative enfolding of music, painting, poetry, and dance, continued a symbolist tradition of the total art work, it did so by initiating new modernist modes of choreography and performance. It not only eschewed the vocabulary of classical ballet movement in favour of an innovative, anti-virtuosic movement style, but instituted new ideologies of performative interpretation and new ways of structuring temporality that evoked the experience of modernity. All three works explored highly eroticised subject matter, each in its own time challenging norms of morality and propriety but, crucially, the ballet enacted these through presenting an eroticised male body as the object of its audience’s gaze.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Italian as ‘Maschilità dea-denti e L’Après-midi d’un faune’, in Marco Pustianaz and Luisa Villa (eds) Maschilità decadenti: La Lunga fin de siècle, Bergamo: Bergamo University Press (trans. Patrizia Verolli), pp. 337–55. I am grateful to Marco Pustianaz for his comments at the time. I am also very grateful to Hanna Järvinen not only for her generous feedback when I was rewriting the chapter for this book and giving me a copy of her PhD but also for sharing with me her copies of contemporary French reviews of Nijinsky’s production of the ballet.