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This page will be used for conceptualizing ideas regarding Afternoon of a Faun (Nijinsky)

To Do

Revise Choreo section

Revise Performance section

• premiere
• Further Performances
• Later performances

Sentence Revision From: Choreography

To this were added a short tail, a belt of vine leaves and a cap of woven golden hair surrounding two golden horns giving the impression of a circlet.

A short tail, a belt of vine leaves, and a cap of woven golden hair surrounding two golden horns which gave the impression of a circlet were added to the costume.

or:

The costume was completed with the addition of a short tail, a belt of vine leaves, and a cap of woven golden hair surrounding two golden horns which gave the impression of a circlet.

Lead

text here

Creation

Performances and reception

Nijinsky as the faun. Taken by Baron de Meyer who published a book of photographs of the ballet

Premiere and reaction

On 28 May 1912, an invited audience attended the dress rehearsal. There was silence as it finished. Gabriel Astruc, a French impresario who assisted Diaghilev with finance, publicity and bookings, came on stage and announced that the ballet would be repeated. This time, there was some applause before the audience was presented champagne and caviar in the theatre foyer.

The Afternoon of a Faun was premiered on 29 May at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The faun was danced by Vaslav Nijinsky, senior nymph by Nelidova, and Bronislava Nijinska danced the 6th nymph. The conductor was Pierre Monteux. On the opening night, the ballet was met with a mixture of applause and booing, and again it was repeated. After the repeated showing, the audience applauded, and the sculptor, Auguste Rodin who was in the audience, stood up to cheer.

Commedia carried a long article by its editor Gaston de Pawlowski praising the ballet and supporting articles by Louis Vuillemain and Louis Schneider. Vuillemain wrote that this ballet had the most pleasing acting, dancing, and music he had ever seen before. Le Théâtre carried a review by Schneider where he applauded Nijinsky's ability and focus to accurately adapt his choreography to Debussy's composition.|sign=|source=}}

A strikingly different response appeared in Le Figaro, where the editor, Gaston Calmette, also carried a front page article on the ballet. Calmette denounced the ballet after declining to publish the favourable report of his normal theatre critic, Robert Brussel. Calmette wrote that the ballet was not artful, imaginative, nor meaningful. He then goes on to critique the choreography of the faun as being "filthy" and "indecent" which he argued deservedly incited the booing at the initial showings. Calmette was much more complimentary about Nijinsky's other performances that were part of the same evening's schedule as the showing of the Faun. He applauded Nijinsky in Le Spectre de la Rose, which Michel Fokine choreographed, and said that this was the kind of ballet that should be preformed for the public. |sign=|source=}}

Cartoon by Daniel de Losques published in Le Figaro, 30 May 1912

Diaghilev responded to Calmette by forwarding letters of support, which to Le Figaro which they published the following day. The painter Odilon Redon, a friend of Mallarmé, suggested how much the author of the original poem on which the ballet had been based would have approved: "more than anyone, he would have appreciated this wonderful evocation of his thoughts."

In another letter that Diaghilev submitted, Auguste Rodin wrote that Nijinsky's acting and attention to detail within the movements of his body worked wonderfully to convey the character and mind of the faun. Rodin noticed the antique forms of the frescoes and other art in Nijinsky's display. The artist expressed the feeling that Nijinsky's was a scupltor's "ideal model."|sign=|source=}}

The dispute about the ballet spread, taking on a political tone. Le Figaro was accused of attacking the Ballets Russes because it opposed the France's political policy to ally with Russia, and that this represented an opening to smear all things Russian. The Russian ambassador became involved, French politicians signed petitions, and the President and Prime Minister asked a government commission to report. The Paris police attended the second night of the ballet because of its alleged obscenity, but took no action after they saw the public's support. The ending of the ballet may have been temporarily amended to be more proper. Tickets to all performances were sold out and Parisians clamoured to obtain them by any means.

Michel Fokine claimed to be shocked by the explicit ending of Faun, despite at the same time suggesting that the idea of the faun lying down in a sexual manner on top of the nymph's veil had been plagiarised from his own ballet Tannhäuser. In this ballet, Fokine choreographed the hero to lay down in a comparable manner upon a woman. However, Fokine found some points to compliment in the ballet, including the use of pauses by the dancers where traditionally there would have been continuous movement, as well as the juxtaposition of angular choreography with the very fluid music.

Fokine's animosity to Faun is partly explainable by his own difficulties in preparing Daphnis and Chloe, which was to premiere the week following Faun and was not complete. Diaghilev tried to cancel Daphnis but it was postponed to 8 June. Daphnis only received two performances even though it was considered a success by critics such as Le Figaro. The company was sharply divided into two factions by the quarrel, some supporting Nijinsky and some Fokine. The final result consisted of Fokine leaving the company on bad terms with Nijinsky regardless of the fact that the partnership between Nijinsky as dancer and Fokine as choreographer had been enormously successful for them both.

Further performances

One of the designs by Bakst for nymph costumes

The Ballet Russes chose not to show Faun in the London season immediately following its Paris appearance. Instead, the company premiered L'Oiseau de feu, Narcisse, and Thamar for the first time in London. In the autumn, a German tour began at the Stadt-Theater in Cologne on 30 October, moving to the New Royal opera House in Berlin on 11 December. The Berlin programme included Faun which was preformed before the Kaiser, the King of Portugal, and sundry dignitaries. Diaghilev reported to Astruc that this showing was a "huge success" resulting in ten encores without protest. Serge Gregoriev, who had just resigned from the Mariinsky Theatre to join Diaghilev full-time as stage manager, was more sanguine, reporting that "faun fell flat", but he confirmed the overall success of the German tour.

In spring 1913, the ballet was performed in Vienna, where it again had a cool reception, though not so bad as Petrushka, which the orchestra of the Vienna Opera House initially refused to play because they disliked the music. The company returned to London, where the response was completely different and both ballets were well-received. On it's first performance, there was some hissing in the audience, but the majority favoured it, and it again received an encore. The Times described Nijinsky's performance as "extraordinarily expressive," and complimented the ballet on it's ability to appeal to the audience in a way the public had never seen a ballet do before. Writing in the Daily Mail, music critic Richard Capell said, "The miracle of the thing lies with Nijinsky – the fabulous Nijinsky, the peerless dancer, who as the faun does no dancing" and goes on to praise his acting as well as the single leap which he deems an "illumination" of the faun's dichotomy between man and animal.

Later performances

In 1931, shortly after the death of Diaghilev and some of his dancers settled in London, the Rambert Ballet took L'Après-midi d'un faune into its repertoire. Leon Woizikovsky, who had danced the faune in the last years of the Diaghilev company and whom Nijinsky taught, reproduced the ballet for Rambert's company. Rambert Ballet revived Faun for several years. The reproduction met with criticism from Cyril Beaumont who commented in his book that the ballet becomes “meaningless, if given, as sometimes happens, without the essential nymphs”.

At the Nureyev Festival at the London Coliseum in July 1983, Rudolf Nureyev danced the faun as part of a Homage to Diaghilev in a mixed bill of ballets. Then, in the late 1980s, dance notation specialists Ann Hutchinson Guest and Claudia Jeschke reconstructed the ballet from Nijinsky's own notebooks, his dance notation, and the photographs of the dancers that Baron Adolph de Meyer produced shortly after the original performance of the ballet. This reconstructed version is often presented alongside Nijinsky's other works or repertoire from the Ballets Russes.

Legacy

new text??

Other Art

add in paragraph about Mallarme poem

second paragraph here needs a  tag