Review: Nijinsky’s ‘Letter to a man’ read by Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov, solo-performer of "Letter to a Man" became a ballet legend in the 70s. He is probably the most recognizable ballet dancer thanks to numerous film and TV roles, including Sex and the City. At 68 years, the dancer and choreographer is still performing, this time in the role of Vaslav Nijinsky, the iconic Russian ballet dancer of the beginning of the 20th century. The production directed by Robert Wilson is currently running at BAM as a part of the Next Wave Festival and is based on Nijinsky’s diaries. Direction, set design and lighting concept is a collaboration of Wilson and Baryshnikov in their attempts to give visuals to a voice of developing schizophrenia.

photo by Lucie Jansch

We find Nijinsky in Budapest in 1945 during the final weeks of World War II. So says the program, in reality we see an aged Pierrot-esque figure dressed in a straitjacket with his face painted white, sitting on a chair. “I understand war because I fought my mother in law” – says the man in Russian. He repeats the phrase multiple times varying his intonation. The English translation is heard shortly after each phrase with a female narrator providing occasional remarks. Fast and dramatic changes of lighting introduce a new voice and create a hypnotic pattern that develops in parallel with the verbal narration.

Short sentences and longer paragraphs (text by Christian Dumais-Lvowski) are mostly delivered through voice-over by the male and female narrators in two languages. The text loops, it repeats itself, sinking the audience in a sort of trance. But the hypnotic effect gets interrupted by sharp piercing sounds that mark the border between scenes (sound desighn by Nick Sagar and Ella Wahlström). The music by Hal Willner weaves the fragments of songs by Tom Waits, Arvo Pärt, Henry Mancini, and Soviet futurist composer, Alexander Mosolov.

photo by Lucie Jansch

Music organically fills in the pauses between scenes, needed for the change of the minimalistic but elaborate set designs. Robert Wilson, a visual artist himself, brings the quality of a painting to his theatrical landscapes. Using lighting as a brush, he creates surreal “canvases”, resembling Malevich’s suprematism at times and Vrubel’s symbolism at others. Each new scene, each new fragment of Nijinsky’s diary, is presented in a new setting, some of which are quite spectacular. The laconic surrealism of Magritte comes to mind with its play between “image” and “reality”, with silhouettes of a faceless man and objects out of their element suspended in the air.    

The memory of Baryshnikov gliding softly through the stage in slow motion, waving tree branches or doing stop-motion choreography sequences near the “corps” and other scenes, are still haunting me many days after I saw “Letter to a man”. There is certainly a grasping quality to this estranged production. The tiny figure of Baryshnikov seems lonely in the vastness of an almost always empty stage. On a rear occasion he has the company of a sculpture, the cutout silhouette of a cartoon girl holding a giant chicken on a leash, or a shadowy figure. Stagehands appear a couple of times to change the scenery, but mostly it happens behind the black curtain.

These transitions seem to become longer towards the end of the show, which ruined a bit of the dramatic tension building up during the scenes. Staring at the closed curtain, for what felt like a few minutes, might be a technical necessity but it wasn’t justified narratively. This avant-guard production about descending into madness, initially coherent and moving forward, started to resemble a series of individual “performances”, “numbers” or “pictures” closer to the end.

photo by Lucie Jansch

This show might have been more successful as a video art exhibit. It already separated Baryshnikov’s voice from his body. The only time when we hear him talk is at the very end, when he says “Vaslav Nijinsky” and disappears behind a small curtain set up in the back of the stage. Such a strange final scene, Baryshnikov is cheerful and content all of a sudden, an abrupt change of pace after the darkly colored existential passages about God, sexuality and “a man” from the letter in the title. The unnamed man is Sergey Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes founder, former employer, lover and friend.

Was it the desire to give the torn apart soul of Nijinsky some rest and peace in the end? Was it the necessity to bend the narrative arc one way or another? Whatever the director’s motivation was, it didn’t land. The confused audience didn’t clap for a few seconds after the show was over. Only after the traditional indicators of the finale, the curtain call and house lights going on were we sure that Nijinsky’s story had come to an end. Then Baryshnikov, dressed in Armani, bows to a standing ovation.