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Nijinsky on YouTube

Film of the famous dancer - real or fake?

by Ismene BrownSaturday, October 17, 2009

Fleeting snippets of Vaslav Nijinsky apparently dancing on primitive film do, astonishingly, seem to capture his legendary liquidity of movement and capacity for making stillness arresting. But are they real?

Here he is in 1910, dancing the Golden Slave in Sheherazade:



Several sequences from his L'après-midi d'un faune, 1912, top and below:





What is the chatter heard on the first film? Is it the voices of Diaghilev and his colleagues while the sequence is being filmed?

In fact, the films are computer-generated by a digital artist using remarkably convincing techniques not very different from those employed by reconstructors of historic choreography.

Read http://boingboing.net/2009/06/25/mysterious-youtube-v.html to discover more.

Comments

Submitted by RUPERT CHRISTIANSEN (not verified) on Mon, 10/19/2009 - 09:23

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completely and obviously faked

Submitted by Ismene Brown (not verified) on Tue, 10/20/2009 - 05:44

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Yes, a fake, but no worse than the Hodson/Archer so-called reconstruction of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, more than half an hour's choreography created by two professors from photographs and reviews, which has been performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Mariinsky. I find that more disturbing as a fake than this since it’s become a commercial venture. This is trickery, but it’s done with no point other than a sort of wistful love and genuine technological bravura. It might almost be.

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