The Book of the Courtesans (22 page)

Yet nothing on earth will ever be purified of its origins. Though her
impressive elevations and the feathery delicacy of her landings were not
illusory, her art depended on long hours of experience with gravity. Born to an
Italian family that had produced dancers for three generations, Taglioni was
trained by her father. By all accounts, he drove her mercilessly. Once the
premier danseur
in Italy, while he performed, composed, and produced
ballet in Europe’s major cities, he was eager to ready his daughter to
follow in his footsteps. The practice which eventually made her appear to be so
light in fact required prodigious labor. She would exercise and dance for six
hours a day, sometimes collapsing with exhaustion in the middle of a session,
only to be bathed by her mother, dressed in clean clothes, and made to return
to her exercise. “If I ever heard my daughter dance,” her father
once said, “I would kill her.” Along with her lightness and grace,
to produce silence required an uncommon prowess, a muscular strength not
usually included in the Romantic picture of feminine fragility.

But such is the nature of life on earth. Whatever exists will usually be
coupled with its opposite. Gravity and grace are less antagonists than lovers.
And delicacy is not a static state but instead a moment in a continuum that
must also include, if one is to survive, strength and daring. During the years
when Romantic ballet was prominent, the fragile-looking dancers who twirled
about in ephemeral tutus were actually risking their lives. More than one died
from burns when their highly flammable costumes brushed too close to the
gaslights at the edge of the stage. Taglioni’s student, Emily Livry, whom
she had been carefully training to take her place one day, died of the burns
she suffered in this way.

But there is this, too. The image of chastity that Taglioni emanated was at one
end of a pendulum that swung just as often in the other direction. That the
dancer Fanny Elssler, who soon rivaled Taglioni’s popularity, became
celebrated for her sensually suggestive movements was only part of the story.
Even while Taglioni seduced her audiences with exulted sighs of motion,
backstage, countless scenes of a far coarser nature were taking place. To raise
interest in and hence funds for the ballet performances, Dr. Veron, who was the
director of ballet at the Paris Opéra, allowed a select group of men to
enter the
foyer de la danse
where the dancers practiced, warmed up,
and rested after performing. Climbing a staircase installed at the left of the
stage, gentlemen from the audience would give their names to an assistant, who
had a list of those who were to be admitted. Once inside, they would watch the
dancers work, most fascinated less by art than by anatomy, particularly legs.
At the end of a performance, many men would leave with a young dancer,
sometimes stealing her away from her mother’s protective eyes, and at other
times bargaining with a mother for the cost of an evening.

As was true for actresses, although ballet dancers were paid more than
grisettes
, the salary was small. It allowed for only the most meager
existence. Unless she were a star, after basic expenses, nothing was left to
support her mother or save for retirement, which for a dancer comes early. Thus,
as also was true for actresses, dancers were often courtesans. The fashion for
keeping dancers all through the nineteenth century was so common that the
euphemism still used for keeping a mistress, “
Il a sa danseuse
,
” was coined in this period. Aristocrats and wealthy entrepreneurs,
artists and writers, even heads of state shared a passion for dancers.
Napoléon III, emperor of the Second Empire, was such a frequent visitor
backstage that he kept a private room there. Baron Haussmann, the architect the
emperor had commissioned to redevelop the city, kept the dancer Francine
Cellier, who, in order to avoid scandal, dressed like his daughter whenever
they went out together. A dancer called Finette was kept by the American
painter James Whistler. Some, like Cléo de Mérode, were more famous
as courtesans than dancers. And a very few such as Lolotte, for instance, who
became the comtesse d’Hérouville, were courtesans only temporarily,
before they ascended into the aristocracy.

It is fascinating to ponder the irony that a depiction of a woman which implies
that she is more spirit than flesh should inspire raw lust. The paradox is an
old one. The idea of female purity has had erotic implications for centuries.
Young women presented as virgins often command higher prices in brothels than
do experienced women. The desire is not only for innocence but for the
spiritual renewal that is associated with a chaste body. In the end the two
extremes, lust and chastity, belong to each other. Logically, one always
implies the existence of the other. Neither can be defined separately. Nor
ultimately can they be experienced apart from each other. In the process of
preserving chastity, one must continually be wary of lust. Lust is the
necessary preoccupation of chastity. It is even easier to understand that
anyone possessed by spiritless desire would eventually fixate on chastity, too,
as a symbol of the missing soul. Indeed, in a world in which body and spirit
were separated and conceived as opposites, to achieve a fully erotic life would
be like trying to balance on a narrow precipice. Thus did the ballet dancer,
straining to stay aloft for a few miraculously graceful moments, her toes bent
painfully back on point, have a titillating appeal, reflecting at once the
possibility of ecstasy and the vulnerability of satisfaction.

The Faun

I was poor. I earned
65
rubles a month .
 . . not enough to feed both
my mother and myself.—Vaslav Nijinsky,
Notebook on Life
Bartering one’s body for financial or social benefits was not unusual
among young actors and actresses, ballet dancers or singers. 
. . . 
—Peter Ostwald,
Vaslav Nijinsky

Though the dancer has rarely, if ever, been called a courtesan, there are
episodes in his life that could easily be found in the biography of a
cocotte
. That he was taken as a lover by several older, wealthy and
more powerful men, that his bills were paid by them, that it was through his
protectors he was educated and introduced to a more sophisticated world, that
eventually he was to be canonized in public opinion as a celebrated object of
desire, all speak to the striking resemblance.

Nijinsky met his first protector, Prince Pavel Lvov, shortly after
graduating from the Imperial Ballet School, while he was still a dancer at the
Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. As in Paris, it was common in Russia for
wealthy men to seek lovers among men and women dancers, both groups underpaid
and struggling. With his innovative interpretation of classic roles, Nijinsky
was already becoming a sensation. Lvov dressed the dancer in fashionable
clothes and furnished him with an elegant apartment, took him to cafés and
parties, making it possible for him to mingle with a society far more affluent
than he had ever encountered before. It was here that Nijinsky found still
other protectors, including a Polish count, whom years later he remembered
chiefly because he had bought him a piano. And he met his most famous lover in
these circles, too, the man who was to make him famous: Sergei Pavlovich
Diaghilev.

When Diaghilev was organizing a ballet company to import to Paris,
simultaneously, Nijinsky became both his lover and his protégé.
Diaghilev supported him, making sure he dressed well, suggesting what he should
read, bringing him to museums, pointing out the paintings he himself admired,
as well as introducing him to a set of celebrated and accomplished
friends—Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust among them. And of course,
Nijinsky became a principal dancer in his lover’s company. The partnership
belongs to history now. With music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography by Michel
Fokine, and Nijinsky as a principal performer, the company that was eventually
to be called the
Ballets Russes
produced a revolution not only in
dance but in all the other arts as well.

Along with facing the same circumstances which gave rise to
galanterie,
Nijinsky shared many of the virtues that courtesans had. In the role of a
dancer and a choreographer, his timing was astonishing—his erotic beauty
can still be seen in the photographs that survive him; the way he moved was at
times so brazen that his performances inspired more than one scandal. Although
he was known to be somewhat inarticulate, his choreography was brilliantly
creative; he celebrated pleasure in his art; and while he was not necessarily
famous for his charm, he was astonishingly graceful.

Indeed, whether or not he can be called a courtesan, Nijinsky’s particular
grace calls to mind an aspect of this virtue in which many courtesans were
known to excel. Just as gracefulness shapes and enlivens certain traditional
movements, grace also informs and even allows innovations to be made. We might
even say that since innovations change our perceptions of what grace is, this
virtue continually gives birth to itself. Though for the simple reason that
grace is not solitary, this can never be a virgin birth. As with pleasure,
grace is always coupled with culture. Thus when a culture changes, so does its
estimation of what is graceful.

And there is this to consider, too. The climate of a culture is never itself
isolated; rather, it hinges on history. Dance mimics the movements of the body
politic. We need only remember that during the French Revolution the rigid
balletic positions once required at court gave way to looser, more flowing
gestures. Yet the hinge of this doorway moves in two directions. Just as often,
dance provides the first signals of social change. When Nijinsky stunned
Parisian audiences with an astonishing leap during which he seemed to hover
momentarily in midair before disappearing into the wings, did they understand
the stunning feat they had just witnessed was symbolic of a future,
simultaneously invisible and palpable, a mood whose powerful presence could be
felt as if hovering in the atmosphere?

The change was augured in other ways. Through one of the attributes of the
Three Graces, the revelation of the body, all over Paris an ancient form of
grace was returning to the stage: Lanthélme’s slouch, Isadora
Duncan’s liquidity, La Goulue’s cancan, Otero’s Spanish dance, the
jut of a hip, the lifting of a leg. An erotic vocabulary of movement was
reappearing. Yet, as Nijinsky began more and more to explore the dimensions of
his own desire, he took the revelation even further.

In the ballet he choreographed to Debussy’s
L’Après-midi d’
un faune,
the dancer pushed the sensibilities of his audiences to the
breaking point. The music he used was composed in response to a popular poem by
Mallarmé, a poem that itself had broken convention by describing
masturbation. But where Mallarmé achieved his effect by subtle allusion,
Nijinsky was shockingly direct. Though his choreography was innovative, the
first part of the ballet was more or less acceptable. Following the traditional
story, Nijinsky, who appeared wearing a wig of golden curls and horns on his
head and carrying a flute and a cluster of grapes, danced the part of the Faun
aroused by a bevy of nymphs who flee from all his advances. The end of the
ballet, though, was a different matter. Laying on top of the scarf he had
stolen from one of the nymphs, Nijinsky thrust his pelvis into the fabric,
moving his whole body as if he were having an orgasm.

The dancer’s art was provocative in other ways, too. Not only did he
challenge the unwritten laws which forbade such a frank display of masculine
sexuality, he leaped over the strict definitions that divide men from women.
The fact that his body—with its thick thighs, the enormous strength, the
darkly beautiful eyes—suggested androgyny made his movements seem even
more a mixture of masculine and feminine conventions: here an enormous leap,
there the head coquettishly tilted, here ferociously growling, there undulating
across the stage like a serpent. The roles he played often accentuated this
ambiguity. Cast as slave and lover of his master in more than one ballet,
Pavillon d’Armide
,
Cléopâtre
, and
Sché
hérazade
, he was alternately dominant and submissive, ferocious and
pliable.

That the way he danced reflected the circumstances of Nijinsky’s own life
did not escape his audiences, who were fascinated by the love affair between
the dancer and his master. Cocteau has made a drawing of the two men, walking
down the street, Diaghilev’s arm around Nijinsky’s shoulders, the older
man engulfing the younger. We can see why Nijinsky’s feelings for Diaghilev
were ambivalent. He felt overpowered, and chafed at the control that the man
who was not only his lover but also paid his bills and directed his career
exercised over him. Eventually, Nijinsky freed himself, only to marry a wealthy
woman who once again provided his support.

It does not seem far-fetched to see a mirror of his own dilemma in the central
character of a ballet he created at the end of his career. In
Papillons de
la Nuit
, Nijinsky told the story of a courtesan, once beautiful, now
“an indomitable spirit in the traffic of love, selling girls to boys,
youth to age, woman to woman, man to man.” Though it was never performed,
the ballet would have been fascinating, once again reflecting what audiences
might have preferred to avoid, though it is easy to imagine that the image
would have been strangely beautiful.

And is this not the ultimate achievement of grace? To translate difficult
circumstances, contradictory demands, ambivalent feelings, painful perceptions
into a dance that even as it takes the breath away, moves us in a new direction.
Witnessing what we do not entirely understand, we find ourselves suddenly
taking an unpredictable leap—a risk of the most dangerous kind, a leap of
the imagination.