"an astonishing performance, troubling, mercurial, nuanced..."

June 12, 2003 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Plato, reluctantly, one always feels, banished the artist from his Republic, sensing the divine madness, the creative arrogance, and terrible innocence that drives a mere human to compete with the gods.

In Nijinsky's Last Dance now playing at the BTF's Unicorn Theatre, Jeremy Davidson, alone on a bare stage, literally strips naked before us as the talented, tormented soul and the flesh of a human body are touched by the fiery fingers of creation. Before our eyes, he suffers under and at times joys in the talent within himself that is as natural as breathing and as crippling as death.

Davidson appears on a bare stage, the padded cell in which he spent the last thirty years of his life. He howls into the light in his strait-jacket and snaps the bonds that would restrain him. He shed layers of clothing until (briefly in Rodin's studio) he stands naked before us, reduced to mere flesh-and yet more, momentarily a Greek statue, but one in which Apollo writhes with the Dionysian animal passion of the Faun.

Nijinsky's Last Dance is an amazing stage work and goes far beyond the limits of a solo performance. It bears slight resemblance to the monologs in which an actor takes on for us a range of other characters.

Instead, Davidson with agile body and half-dancing movement shows us the other characters, brings them onto the stage with him through the mad mind of Nijinsky. It is as though he stands beside them, pointing them out to us in a sort of double-take or super-imposed film. We see and hear Diaghilev but Nijinsky is beside him, within him. It is an amazing form of acting.

And despite the madness in which we, the audience, are actively drawn, forced, almost against our will to participate, we get the story of Nijinsky's creative life - one that ended when he was a mere 28 years old (sadly, he existed mad, until age 62).

As Davidson, ever on the move physically, moves dynamically, at times manically, about his cell, we get his story in agile stabs of memory.

The brilliant ten year-old, dancing in the St. Petersburg Imperial School of Ballet. The 20 year-old whom Diaghilev captures and dominates, personally as well as professionally. The triumphant "God of the Dance" who triumphs in Paris for four whirling years during which ballet was literally transformed into what we now call Modernism.

Nijinsky dances through it, scandalizing with a raw animal intensity but leaping with an agility that seemed literally to suspend him above the earth. And at the same time, he lives with a terrible child-like innocence.

Within a few years he will rebel at being Diaghilev's boy-toy, break free or be let go when he marries, fathers a daughter, will be interned during WWI, freed by machinations from very high places, to be briefly pulled back into Diaghilev's orbit.

But it cannot go on. His creative story ends in a crucifix of light that washes across the stage floor. As he tells us, "The mad hear things that others don't." God has spoken. Enough.

Davidson, alone on the stage, is ably surrounded by other unseen creators.

Norman Allen's script, Joe Calarco's direction, Karma Camp's choreography, and the magnificent lights and sound provided by Daniel MacLean Wagner and David Maddox. The music to which Davidson moves ranges from Debussy's "Faun" to Strauss's "Til Eulenspiegel" and weaves a background for the story that Nijinsky in this play is determined to share with us.

For a few brief years, almost a hundred years ago, Nijinsky blazed across the sky a god of dance. Then, as he touchingly tells us in his biography, "I want to live for a long time. I wanted to dance more, but God said to me, 'Enough.' I stopped."

Nijinsky's life and his art are symbolized on the program cover. A dancer's bare feet bound in ropes.

On the Unicorn stage, Davidson, who claims to be an actor not a dancer, dances, even in repose. His is an astonishing performance, troubling, mercurial, nuanced, that breaks the heart with its terrible talent and its tortured grief.

As an audience member it is impossible not to become involved. This is a rare experience. Go.