Rudolf Nureyev | L'Aprés-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of the Faun) / 1979

sexual illusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vaslav Nijinsky (choreographer), L'Aprés-midi d'un Faune (Afternoon of the Faun) [performance by Rudolf Nureyev with the Joffrey Ballet] / 1979

 

Although we do have a 3-minute tape of Nijinsky’s original performance of the Claude Debussy-based Afternoon of a Faun, it is so badly filmed, with missing segments, that it is hard to know what his performance really looked like. But fortunately we have a full video/CD performance of Rudolf Nureyev’s 1979 performance, based on Nijinsky’s original choreography, that I couldn’t imagine being less sensuous that the original 1912 original.

    This ballet is not at all “gay” in its substance; but the focus on the faun’s body, with his constantly erect tale and seeming half-nude ballet costume with piebald shapes to suggest the faun’s skin is most certainly homoerotic, particularly since in ends in a kind of festishized frotting of one of the nymph’s shawl, dropped in her escape from the faun.

      The work was purposely archaic, the movements meant to looked like the figures on Greek urns. Yet the work was also represented a radical shift from traditional ballet, taking it in new directions that would lead to modern dance companies like the Joffrey (where I studied for a few months).

       And the gay dancer Nureyev does everything he can to eroticize the role, twisting his torso in ways that feature his groin and erect tail. Even his arm gestures early in the ballet, as the fawn awakens become somewhat sexual.

       The fawn, even if he is attracted to the six nymphs, particularly their leader (danced by Charlene Gehm in this production), acts as a king of narcissism, and it is his body upon which the dance focuses, as the nymphs merely move laterally across the stage in posed positions, hands high in the air as on the Greek statuary.

        Even after the departure of the nymphs, Nureyev draws attention to his movements as he performs a series of astonishing relevés as he moves up to stony cliff to his original sleeping spot.

       And his final fetishizing of the lost shawl upon which he rubs his full body is truly sexual. If it might symbolize the woman who wore it, it is his sexual act to which we are witness rather than intercourse with a woman. And, after all, the faun is left with only a shawl, not with a nymph. Even in Mallarme’s far more heterosexual original poem, we realize that the sexual encounters of the faun were just an illusion.

     Is it any wonder that this ballet both delighted and scandalized Paris audiences upon its premier? It also a parting of the ways between the Ballet Russes and choreographer Michel Fokine, Fokine jealous of Nijinsky and director Sergei Diaghilev’s attentions, both on and off-stage, to him.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 26, 2025).