“GHOST” AT A BALLET

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 March 1929, Page 11

“GHOST” AT A BALLET

' FAMOUS DANCER’S NERVES. Nijinsky, the dancer, once known as “the man of whom the gods are jealous,” but for years past the victim of a mysterious mental malady, played a strange and tragic part when Serge Diaghileff’s ballet gave a performance at the Paris Opera House a few weeks ago. The unfortunate Nijinsky, who is eternally famous for his dancing in such masterpieces as “Prince Igor,” “Scherazade,” and Debussy’s “L-Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” fell into an extraordinary mental condition twelve years ago. In an attempt to become more inspired he started to . apply auto-suggestion, persuading himself, for example, that he really was a faun. The greatest mental specialists of Europe have tried to restore him without the slightest success.

Serge Diaghileff, who loved Nijinsky like a brother, has made every effort to find a cure for his- former star. Recently, he conceived the fantastic idea of taking Nijinsky to a performance of the Russian Ballet in the hope that the music, the dancing, the sight of old friends, would bring a rush of memories that would sweep him back to normality. Then came the idea of arranging that Mme. Karsavina should appear on the night chosen for the great experiment. She had shared many triumphs with Nijinsky in the past. Surely, if he remembered any face, it would be hers. She appeared in the role of Petrouchka with Serge Lifar, as she had once danced it with. Nijinsky. Only two people in the crowded house —Diaghileff and Alexander Benois, a Russian artist —knew that Nijinsky was there. He looked his part in the experiment—a ghost from another world —as he sat with his two friends in the shadows of a box beside the stage, with the cream of Parisian society flashing and glittering beneath them.

When the ballet began Nijinsky looked at the dancers for a moment without showing the slightest interest or recollection, and then turned his head away. Even when Karsavina appeared and the whole . audience jumped to its feet with “bravos,” he simply gazed at her with a queer stare. Then, with tears in their eyes, l Diaghileff and the painter led Nijinsky out to a motor-car, and he was driven back to the private mental home where he lives. \ Nijinsky, who was the creator of a new and realistic style of ballet dancing, first went to London in 1911 and scored startling successes. He was about to begin a £lOOO-a-week engagement at the Coliseum when he had a nervous breakdown, the beginning of the illness which developed and Caused retirement two years later.