Countering the Plot: Kairotic Force (Sila) in Nijinsky's Literary Choreography (1919)

• In Event: Liberation from Plot in Dance, Film, and Theater

Abstract

In explaining his dance theory in 1916, Nijinsky invited the public to imagine "a ballet almost—to put an extreme case—without movement." Using his four ballets as a touchstone, this paper turns to Nijinsky's experiments with stillness/movement in his multimodal Theory of Dance project, containing dance notation, drawings, and life-writing. Specifically, I focus on the life-writing portion, a book titled Feeling. The events that drive the narrative forward, leading to the dancer's eventual institutionalization in Zurich, constitute the plot—both in the sense of conspiracy and in the sense of literary narrative. The dancer-writer counters this plot by exploring what he calls an "inner force" (vnutrenniaia sila) or "feeling." To what extent, can sila (kairos) liberate Nijinsky from the plot (chronos)—and as he sees it, the world from catastrophe?

Author

• Nicole C. Svobodny, Washington U in Saint Louis