Nijinsky’s Last Dance

Author: Norman Allen

One-man performance by Georgi Grozev

Director: Georgi Grozev

Translation: Radostin Zhelev

Set Designer: Kiril Naumov

Choreographer and Assistant Director: Philip Milanov

Music: Georgi Atanasov

Visual Environment: Petko Tanchev

Photographer and Poster: Izabela Manolova

The performance explores the clash between creative genius, the flight of the spirit, and the ultra-material world of Europe, which passed through the Industrial Revolution and arrived at the First World War as an apocalyptic collapse of our civilization. Drawing on the biography of the great Nijinsky, it raises questions about the survival of the Spirit and the price that must be paid.

The great question of the survival of the Spirit and of art as its expression in contemporary human civilization must be examined. Little more than a hundred years later, this civilization once again stands on the brink of repeating the same historical mistakes, placing materialism, individualism, and career success above the primordial human, spiritual, and cultural values.

The play also raises the question of the price the artist pays for his talent, for the possibility of realizing his work and bringing it to his audience, for breaking existing stereotypes in art and blazing a revolutionary path in the search for new, richly expressive means and forms that will give rise to an entirely new era.

Vaslav Nijinsky’s contribution to world ballet and modern dance can be measured against Stravinsky’s contribution to modern music. It is no coincidence that Nijinsky, together with Stravinsky and Debussy, created a series of ballets that at once enchanted, shocked, and even outraged their contemporaries.

The revolutionary and scandalous introduction of dancing on the whole foot in ballet, the creation of choreography and a visual image inspired by and stylized after the antique frescoes of ancient Greek ceramics, as well as the use of the dancing body as an ecstatic expression of extreme transcendental experiences, reaching an aesthetic of the ugly, are the brilliant and bold discoveries in Nijinsky’s ballet, which were taken up and further developed by Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham and led to the emergence of modern dance and modern ballet.

“THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN REALIZED WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE”

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