Stoned-Age Allegory

By William Bender

To his legions of supporters, he is avant-garde and brilliant. To his many detractors, he is passe and boring. Actually, Choreographer Maurice Bejart of the Brussels-based Ballet of the 20th Century is all of those things. Part iconoclast, part P.T. Barnum, part aesthetic bluffer, Bejart deliberately gears his creations not to the sophisticated superegos of the modern dance audience but to the sensation-seeking ids of the young generation and the leisure class.

His stated mission is messianic. He is out to reach a new and bigger audience--the neophytes who may not necessarily understand or appreciate ballet but have a thirst for it anyway. In this he has succeeded. Opting for stadiums and arenas rather than conventional ballet halls, he has become probably the most commercially successful choreographer alive. When his latest full-length ballet, Nijinsky, Clown of God, came to New York for a 19-performance run that will end this weekend, it seemed only appropriate that the locale should be the 4,000-seat Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden.

Nijinsky is Bejart's most ostentatious work to date. In it his flair for the spectacular, the mod and the grotesque is overwhelming, in ways that admittedly may whelm some more than others. Equipped with enough stage runways for a good suburban airport, adorned ominously by the obligatory --or so it seems these days--cross of Calvary, Nijinsky is essentially an old-fashioned allegory play dolled up for the stoned age. Its recounting of the life of the great Russian dancer is set to a schizoid musical score (electronics by Pierre Henry, schmalz by Tchaikovsky). To Bejart, Nijinsky is a cast of characters all by himself--artist, simpleton, genius, child of nature and clown of God. Nijinsky also went mad in his last years and thought he was Jesus. Drawing on that, Bejart goes on to pose Nijinsky as a symbol of Man. On that allegorical level, the ballet is a paean to love as the true expression of God. Nijinsky stands for all the simple, warm people who need to love and be loved.

Opposed to him is Impresario Serge Diaghilev, who fires Nijinsky (Jorge Donn) for daring to marry Woman (Suzanne Farrell). Diaghilev symbolizes a false God who is at once greedy, arrogant and possessive. If Bejart's whole dramatic concept is embarrassingly commonplace, it obviously appealed to him as a chance to fashion the kind of mass ritual he likes best.

The lights go up on three scanty-panty circles of writhing male dancers. They then form a single circle of life, and voil`a it is genesis time. Nijinsky is given life and immediately departs for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe, which represents earthly paradise. Thereafter, the graceful and the grotesque prance the stage in some of the longest, slowest processionals since Catherine de Medici introduced ballet spectacle to the court of France in the late 16th century. Nymphs, whores and clowns flutter merrily about. Morality figures of death and madness strut menacingly. The serpent, dressed in a red flapperesque wig and pelvis-pinching tights, snakes sneakily around her victims. Nijinsky ascends the cross for several minutes of agony, then descends to triumph over Diaghilev in the name of love and artistic freedom.

Diaghilev appears in the twin forms of a puppeteer and a fearsome 12-ft-tall dummy, both in top hat and tails. Nijinsky himself assumes five different guises. The central Nijinsky is the clown of God (played by Donn), naked save for flesh-colored bikini shorts and pain-suggesting streaks on his cheeks. The other four are all characters originated or made famous by Nijinsky--Petrushka, Faun, Golden Slave and La Rose, each played by a different dancer. Given the presence of five Nijinskys on a single stage, one could well imagine the kind of pas de cinq that George Balanchine, for one, might have invented. Given the same challenge, Bejart has merely settled for five Nijinskys on a single stage. It is little help that Bejart makes no claims for his own choreographic inventiveness, or lack of same. "I am not attempting," he says, "the creation of beautiful works that will endure forever." Good thing, too, for in terms of neither pure dance nor gaudy drama is he able, at least in Nijinsky, to rise above the level of the truistic, trite and transparent. qedWilliam Bender

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