How can we separate the dancer from the dance? Vaslav Nijinsky's art was a vanishing act, and his mystique depended on gestures that lasted only a second, like his leap through a window in "The Spectre of a Rose," or the slight but scandalous quivering of his thighs that mimed ejaculation when, performing Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun," he rubbed himself against the captured drapery of a fleeing nymph. Offstage he was stolid — as blockish as Stravinsky's wooden Petrushka or, according to the sniffy socialites who patronized the Ballets Russes, as unimpressive as a shop assistant, a plumber's apprentice or a stable lad. After his mental breakdown, he spent decades in a state of blank-eyed mutism, interrupted only by inappropriate giggling fits.
Lucy Moore retells the familiar story engagingly, with due deference to Richard Buckle's completer account, but she can't help expressing her bafflement about a man whose art denied him a verbal outlet while requiring him to work through a series of mysterious physical metamorphoses.
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