Sunday, September 22

[dirac]

A visit to the Morgan Library's Ballets Russes exhibition with William Corwin and Oliver Herring.

Quote

Nijinsky was around twenty-two when he created L’Après midi d’un faune. A short ballet with a score by Claude Debussy, it caused a riot in the theater in its first performance, and the police were present during the second, “it’s such a foundational piece, so singular; one of the first modernist ballets,” comments Herring. For him, the ballet is a response to the massive cultural compensation that was necessary in the face of the scientific discoveries at the start off the twentieth century: “That moment in time, everything was just opened up, there were all these new ideas, including psychoanalysis, and that opened up all these possibilities as to what is and what isn’t.” For Herring, L’Après midi d’n faune is basically Nijinsky saying “let’s examine everything again in a new way with new languages that haven’t really been invented yet.”