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).

Jorge Dunn | Bolero / 1982

call to sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jorge Dunn (performer) Bolero / 1982

 

I have never been a fan of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, and apparently he wasn’t either, responding when a woman, after hearing it, told him he was mad, that she was absolutely right. It is and endlessly repetitive piece of about 15 minutes if you follow the rhythms he prescribed, which the great conductor Toscanini refused to play (his version was 12 minutes), causing a break between the composer and conductor.

     But when I saw Argentine dancer Jorge Dunn’s sensual performance I realized truly how  homoerotic this piece was. Dancing bare-chested Dunn uses his entire body to lure the viewer in, even, at times, gesturing with what appear be kisses thrown at the observers. Dunn’s body thrusts forward and backward as if in an orgasm of sex. Meanwhile a group of men sit behind him, a couple joining him as he performs on a raised red circular structure; and then, gradually, others follow as the rhythms of the piece continue and obviously their attraction to this sexual object of desire grows. Slowly more and more of the seated men join in on the sexual orgy, until finally by dance’s end all of the have joined him.

     One might describe this as the male version of Salome’s dance of the seven veils, without any veils, and with an invitation for the observers to join in.

     This work is clearly and almost entirely a homoerotic invitation into the frenzy of dance, a wild call to his male friends to venture out of their voyeurism and join him in his sexual balletic maneuvers. It is the most sexual ballet, perhaps, ever created. It is a gesture for others not only to take notice of his body, but to join in the sexual frenzy of the 15-minute dance.

     I truly can’t imagine what Dunn’s performance is but an expression of gay sexuality, calling forth the lust of all the men watching him perform.

     Dunn danced with the Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the 20th Century, appearing in at least 4 films, one directed by his filmmaker nephew, Aliocha Itovich. He died of AIDS in 1992 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (April 2025).

Norman McLaren | Narcissus / 1983

the closeted narcissus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernand Nault (choreographer), Norman McLaren (director) Narcissus / 1983

 

For years Canadian film director/animator Norman McLaren, a gay man long living a semi-closeted life through years of public homophobia, had struggled to find a way to express in his films his homoerotic concerns, but felt that his conceptions would not be acceptable for his productions distributed through the National Film Board of Canada. I discuss some of his animations and films with coded images elsewhere in these volumes; but in the 1970s, when he was working on early sketches for a piece on the Narcissus legend, McLaren came upon a different version from the standard Echo-centered presentation of Narcissus. As McLaren writes:

 

“Around 1970, when I was making a 35mm b & w rough sketch of the film with Vincent Warren... I came across a version of the [Narcissus] legend that contained the homo episode (in fact it recounted that Narcissus was besieged by hosts of girls and young boys). The three or four other versions I had read until then had mentioned only Echo... When I discovered the encounter with Ameneius, I got very excited and dead set on including both the girl and youth encounters, as they would not only throw Narcissus’ auto-philia into even greater relief but would give me a very justifiable opportunity to portray a homosexual relationship on the screen. A thing I had often wished to do. I am not sure if at that time (1971) stirrings of gay lib had filtered into the backwoods of my secluded life!”

 

     Other projects intervened, however. And even though McLaren was now ready to finally come out, announcing his homosexuality to the world, he resisted due to the wishes of his partner NFB producer Guy Glover, with whom he had lived for 45 years.

      When in 1979 he returned to the Narcissus project, things had radically changed given the various gay liberation movements, and he felt not only emboldened to include the long scene of gay love between Amenieus and Narcissus, but believed that he would have been a traitor if he had deleted it from his work. McLaren, however, notes that the scene might have been even gayer had he had more control over the project:

 

“Choreographer, Fernand Nault [b. 1921] who is one of us [gay], handled that sequence of the film very gently. I would have wished for him to have done it a bit more boldly, but I didn’t see his choreography until the first days of rehearsal and it was impossible to ask for any radical changes, since we were so pressed for time...”

 

     The final result is a narrative of potential possibilities of love in three parts, two romantic pas de deux danced by Narcissus (Jean-Louis Morin), first with a nymph (Sylvie Kinal) and then with what the program describes as a “hunting partner,” Narcissus’ friend (Sylvain Lafortune). Although both are traditional representations of sexual possibilities, ending with the hero sadly rejecting both heterosexual and homosexual love, there are clearly important differences:  “the male duet,” as MediaQueer commentator Thomas Waugh puts it, “has a stunning effect as an unprecedented representation [in film dance] of gay male sexuality.”

      To the music of Maurice Blackburn, Narcissus awakes very much in the manner of Nijinsky’s L'Après-midi d'un faune, lying flat upon the floor, gradually lifting himself up into a sitting position to reveal his beautiful face and chest, the latter of which he clearly takes self-adorating pleasure,  stroking his nipples and upper chest. Suddenly the nymph appears behind him, at first almost blocking her own vision apparently in the shock of the boy’s beauty, but gradually peeking out of him through her fingers, obviously intrigued. She quietly tiptoes toward him, reaching out to touch  his hair. For a moment Narcissus pulls her toward as if inspecting this new being, but immediately thrusts her away. She continues to try to entice him, pulling him again toward her, a gesture he pulls away from as she gracefully dances about him, he leaning back while still registering a look of curiosity.

     Finally pulling him into an upright position, she leans back to bring him forward, while he, in counter-turn, leans away, she pulling him again toward her, and he leaning away as they were playing a childish game of pull and drag. When she touches his face he shakes her hand off. Through gentle leg lifts and turns she eventually allures him into to mimicking her as they move into the more traditional holding and lifting motions of the standard pas de deux. Yet when they finally reach a moment of a face to face in which she ends a position a sitting on his lower stomach, he quickly pulls away, making it clear that he is disinterested in the traditional male-female position symbolizing sexual ecstasy.

      The nymph backs off, putting her hand to her face in both bewilderment and an expression of shame, much like the Renaissance painters portrayed Eve as she was expelled from the Garden. With a seeming mix of regret and sorrow she sadly drifts off only five minutes and thirty seconds into the ballet.

      Narcissus returns to his seated position, once more stroking his own breast. But at that very moment his friend leaps it a bit like a naughty Puck. This time Narcissus seems delighted and gladly takes his hand as they almost immediately leap into an erotic duo, imitating and mocking each other’s moves as they twist and turn—the camera sometimes alternating between fast and stop motion. This time Narcissus gladly moves toward his friend, taking his arm and joyfully moving into some of the similarly erotic positions of traditional male and female dance movements. Yet their duet is far more playful, involving imitation rather than sexually assigned movements.

      Narcissus allows his friend to stroke his breast and hair, turning shyly away momentarily, only to allow him to repeat the gesture. Narcissus even allows, quivering with pleasure, as his friend runs his hands completely down the length of his body, springing away only when he reaches his feet, perhaps suddenly registering the fact of what has just happened.

      As the friend leaps back to continue his gestures of touch, Narcissus rejects them. Yet when the friend leaps into his arms, putting himself precisely in the same position as the nymph had, hanging on Narcissus’ waist just above his crotch, Narcissus allows him to remain in position undergoing what is quite clearly a moment of intense pleasure from coitus. When completed, however, he pushes the other away, and the friend soon after disappears.

      As if almost proud of his rejection of the other, Narcissus brushes his hand through his own hair and discovers his reflection in a nearby pool, peering into it what might almost be described as an intense gaze of lust, an erotic attention to the self that unlike all other depictions does not end there, but is expanded in McLaren’s work into an extravaganza of a male solo played out through mirrors and bifocal lens as an intense interchange of two images of the same self, challenging one another to athletic displays of various balletic positions, leaps, twists, spins, and imaginary lifts that last for about 10 minutes, about the same length of time that the other two duets added together. To the now electronically-inspired score, the two images of the Morin not only appear horizontally in tandem and in simultaneity, but are projected vertically in space that represents cinematic reversals of the dancer’s movements.

     This delightful portion of the work is, given the beauty of Morin’s body, obviously also highly homoerotic, but is missing almost all sexuality since the two parts of the same image can never truly touch except as they cross electronically through each other’s bodies.

     When finally Narcissus attempts to kiss the other, he discovers that he has given up his heart to a brick wall which, which, as turns toward us, is revealed to be the other side of a prison cell wherein he has locked himself away from all human communication. I cannot imagine a more potent visualization of Vito Russo’s celluloid closet.

     Waugh brilliantly summarizes McLaren’s work: 

      

 “It would be too easy to dismiss this film as yet another arty piece of closet beefcake, and to see  McLaren's lavish stylization as yet another mechanism of avoidance. Still the prison‑bar ending comes across as an image not so much of the tragedy of self‑absorption but of sexual repression, even of the thwarted self‑realization of the closet. As tragic as it is beautiful, Narcissus stands up well as the testament and the yearning of the shy Scottish‑Canadian civil servant who was one of the more isolated queer contemporaries of Visconti, Cadmus, and Burroughs.”

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Thierry Malandain | L'Après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) / 1995

the faun atop a kleenex box

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thierry Malandain (choreography and performance) L'Après-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun) / 1995

 

Thierry Malandain’s version of The Afternoon of a Faun takes the famous ballet further into pure homoerotic and male homosexual directions. If in Vaslav Nijinsky’s original it was the nymphs with whom the faun was enchanted, in this case there are no classic dancers imitating the figures of Greek urns. The dancer Malandain appears only in his dance belt, otherwise nude, and no women are allowed into his imaginary world except as big bubbles of plastic.

    His is a pure male dance, displaying as much as his body as the theater of the day allowed. This work is totally symbolic, for when he reaches for the veil dropped my one of the visiting nymphs left behind, it is simply out of the Kleenex box upon which he apparently resides. The fetish becomes even more obvious as he lays down to have sex with the garment, actually being consumed by the Kleenex box itself.

     This takes the women out of the picture and centers our vision only on the male dancer, which Nureyev almost achieved but because of his attempt to recreate Nijinsky’s version could not be eliminated, although they become even in that version ephemeral illusions. In Malandain’s version they are missing, and we must comprehend his almost nude representation of the dance as an excitement to homoerotic desire.

     Malandain himself describes it:

 

"A faun is lying on a rock when nymphs appear. He observes them, then approaches. Frightened, they run away, except for one. But when he tries to grab her, she moves away, dropping a veil at her feet. The faun seizes it, carries it to his rock, and stretches out on the scarf in an act of love.

      From this argument, I primarily retain the faun's desire and the expression of his sensuality in dreams and fantasy. My proposal does not refer to ancient Greece and its sylvan landscapes, which is why the rock where he takes refuge is no longer the mound painted by Léon Bakst, but a Kleenex box. Due to the innovative nature of the choreography, but also to Nijinsky's gestures of ‘erotic bestiality,’ the first performance was disrupted by the audience's uproar. This carnal pleasure being at the very heart of the work, like the original, depicts my faun evolving in a fantastical and sensual world. Except that it's not a legendary creature, half-man, half-beast, but a solitary young man pouring out his desire to the same hazy memory of love.”

   

      Once more, like the Nureyev version, the focus is on the male, and the viewer can only explore deeply the body of male desire, making us realize just how truly gay this dance was.

       But, obviously, this is a very funny version of the classic, particularly when he falls into the Kleenex box in which he is clearly ready to clean-up from his cum.

       Malandain, born in 1959, followed a classical dance career, working with several companies that explored modern conceptions of dance. But in 1997 he created his own company Ballet Biarritz for which he created numerous original pieces and won several awards for his work.

 

Los Angeles, April 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2025).

George Frideric Handel | Le Concert d’Astrée (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion)/ 2025

the inevitable ravages of time

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Frideric Handel Le Concert d’Astrée (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) / the performance I attended at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles was on March 27, 2025

 

The other evening, with my dear friends Wendy Walker and Carol Tavris, I had the opportunity to see a rarely performed oratorio which might truly be described as an allegorical opera except that when its composer George Frideric Handel lived in Rome, opera was banned, oratorios and cantatas replacing them. The work, Il Trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) has only four characters, consisting of Beauty (Elsa Benoit), Pleasure (Julia Lezheva), Disilluson (Iestyn Davies), and Time (Petr Nekoranec).

       Beauty is what she / he always is, a figure in love with her/himself, looking into the mirror and making a pact with Pleasure that she/he will never abandon one another. Of course, we know given the presence of time, and the warnings by the wonderful counter tenor representing Delusion (Davies) that she is destined to a terrible end if she cannot discover the error of her ways.

        But Handel doesn’t speed through that transformation easily, providing us with almost two hours of incredibly glorious music as Beauty discovers the errors of her ways.

        Under the direction of Emmanuelle Haïm, who also performs on the harpsicord (along with the two full harpsichords, an organ, two recorders, a group of strings, a long-necked plucked lute [a theorbo], oboes and bassoons) this production was truly astoundingly beautiful as we made our way through so many stunning recitatives as these four allegorical figures play out all the challenges of Beauty having to come to terms with Time.

        As always, it’s a sad affair, having to abandon pleasure for the recognition of greater glory of a scared notion of love and protection. Beauty rightfully argues for her needed youthful pleasure, while the busy Disillusion tries to warn her away and ultimately forces her to see the truth of Time and its inevitable results.

     Handel so wonderfully pushes and pulls us through the troubles all of us must share as we come into the recognition that we will not always be what we pretend or even imagine for ourselves by helping us realize through exquisite arias such as “Lascia lap spina, cogli la rosa” (“Leave the Thorn, Take the Rose”) and others that Beauty will necessarily have to abandon her beloved Pleasure.

       Strangely, in this work, Beauty has little fun, while Disillusion has all the best musical moments, despite the fact that all singers were so lovely that you didn’t want them for a moment not to make their cases. This was the earliest and latest of Handel’s compositions, since he couldn’t let that music he had created at such an early age alone. He kept revising, recreating, reusing the lovely refrains he had created. Who wouldn’t?

       This was such an incredibly magnificent musical gathering that I can’t even imagine a more perfect night. Like Cinderella, I lost my shoe in the escape from the spinning wonderment, and became again an old man stumbling into my retreat.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2025

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (April 2025).

 

 

Ron Sossi | Douglas Messerli / 2025 obituary

the long voyage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Why have I delayed in announcing the death of one of the truly great theater producers in Los Angeles? In a sense it is because his influence and talent, and the theater complex he created in Los Angeles was so very overwhelming. Ron Sossi, a Michigan boy who grew up in Detroit, moving to Los Angeles, worked many jobs as he moved to attend the UCLA film school. He supported himself as first as a photographer and water filter salesman to earn his M.F.A. But he was also a singer and actor, who traveled for the USO to Korea, Japan, and Guam. He briefly married actor Bonnie Franklin, and oversaw ABC productions, including Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and Love American Style.

      He was obviously frustrated by his work in television. And founded the Odyssey Theatre first in a storefront church on Hollywood Boulevard, presenting the early productions of Brecht, Jean Claude van Italie's The Serpent, and classics such as Euripides' The Bacchae. In 1973 he moved to a larger venue, producing and directing such major works as Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, and so many others of both classics and new works such as The Adolf Hitler Show, The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Master Class and so very many others. He single-handedly introduced nearly all of Brecht's plays to Los Angeles, including Mother Courage, Baal, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and others. Before the Mark Taper Forum, you could see Beckett on his stages. In 1989, about the time I began to attend Odyssey productions, he had moved to a large former warehouse, creating three theaters (sometimes it seemed like more) on Sepulveda Boulevard, bringing works to production that you couldn't imagine in any theater company. At those theaters I not only saw one-man and woman shows by John Kelly, David Greenspan, John Fleck and Tim Crouch, and many others, but productions of major works by Max Frisch, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Henrik Ibsen, Irene Maria Fornes, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, Taylor Mac, Edward Albee, Murray Mednick...the list goes on. I have never before encountered a space with three stages performing such a variety of work, revivals and contemporary productions.

      I am truly at a loss. Ron Sossi was theater, and his sometimes amateur productions such as a recent revival of William Inge's Picnic, revealed nuances you never before perceived. I looked forward each month to his direction and productions, running over 56-years, which serves as a lesson in world theater. When I now look back I see a theatrical variety which was so very rich that I know of no other local theater company that could have even have imagined his accomplishments. I never met this wonderful man. I saw him, reviewed his plays, but never dared to introduce myself. What a shame. I might have at least shaken his hand, bent down and bowed before his remarkable achievements. I can now only toast him, speak of my love for all he has done.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2025

Reprinted from International Theater, Opera, and Performance (March 2025).

Gustav Mahler | Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / 2025

a trip into mahler’s mind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gustav Mahler Blumine, “Adagio” from Symphony No. 10, and selections from Lieder und Gesänge and Des Knaben Wunderhorn / Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel / 2025 | the concert Howard Fox and I attended was on February 23, 2025

 

Yesterday afternoon Howard and I were fortunate to be able attend a concert of the work of Gustav Mahler, conducted by the great maestro Gustavo Dudamel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

     It began with a “stranded” masterwork Blumine, torn out of his First Symphony, that yet, in its absolute luminous use of strings and subtle clarinets and brass creates very much what Orin Howard describes as a “piece of shimmery poetic restraint,” centered around a romantic sense of sexual expectation and resistance that Richard Wagner might surely have appreciated. The “flower,” the substance of this work, blooms so slowly and imperceptibly that we almost lose our breath as it comes into its final orchestral existence. This is the true substance of longing and desire that cannot utterly be fulfilled.

     And the wonderful Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it a manner that almost literally took our breaths away, particularly given the vertiginous view in which Howard Fox and I sat—probably in the very seats we shared in our very first visit to the concert hall many years ago with its architectural creator Frank Gehry as a member of our party. I am sorry to report that I do suffer, very slightly, from vertigo, and to watch the performance from this height literally did make me gasp for breath: perfect for the work of such endless anticipation.

     The second performance, the “Adagio” from Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, was just as breathtaking. But in this case the anticipation was in how all the strings, the rows of violins, violas, cellos, and woodwind instrumentalists stirring up our emotional tethers which we hoped might be mitigated by the rows of trombonists, tuba players, and bassoonists. This is truly a kind of Wagner-like exploration, expressing the situation when Mahler, whose wife Alma had begun an affair with the great architect Walter Gropius, himself fell into a deep Freudian frenzy of unrequited passion, ending in a kind of mental breakdown; even his manuscript was covered over with statements such as “Madness, seize me, the accursed! Negate me, so I forget that I exist, that I may cease to be!”

     Critics of the time thought the work to be that of a deranged man, a genius suffering a total mental collapse, the territory perhaps of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice. Yet the brass finally do arrive to save the day, resolving the sexual frustrations, even if only briefly, allowing us a final relief in the brief bombast of their voices. Even as the violins and cellos flutter to the end, the purgation of the sexual intensity of this truly sexual masterwork is resolved by a slow putter of the trombones and tuba.

      The second half of the concert was devoted to a selection of Mahler’s Lieder und Gesänge and his Des Knaben Wunderhorn, based on the poems and songs of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, which despite the wonderful performances of singers Ekaterina Gubanova and Simon Keenlyside, just didn’t quite do it for me. They too were almost breathless evocations of boys, women, and goats that, in Mahler’s truly theatrical style, often made us wonder about the folkloric events. But lieder has never been my favorite form. Perhaps you need to be German to truly enjoy the genre; but tales of throwing a ring into the river to find the woman of one’s dreams, a dialogue about a mother and her starving child (with reminisces of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage), and a cry out to heaven to seek the celestial touches of a lost boy just don’t do it for me. 

     The last, as commentator Howard Posner explains, became the theme of Mahler’s fourth movement to his Second Symphony, which might be sublime but seems, in the context, simply overdramatic, one of my problems with many of the great composer's works, and which possibly also explains his later lack of early 20th-century musical recognition. Given the beauty of his music that wasn’t, of course, deserved.

     And Dudamel and his now renowned Los Angeles Philharmonic do simply take one musically speaking into new dimensions that make you feel utterly dizzy with pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2025

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (February 2025).