Faun in the headlights

THE ORIGINAL Nijinsky, in a vintage shot, is captured in profile.

Photograph: Collection of Robert Greskovic

By her own account, Lynn Garafola, a writer, historian and professor of dance at Barnard College, usually spends her free time organizing conferences and film screenings. But the lack of prominent local festivities surrounding the centenary of the first Paris performances of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes prompted her to take action. In "Celebrating Diaghilev in Music and Dance," a program conceived by Garafola, with Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, professor of Russian at Barnard and director of the Harriman Institute, students from Barnard and Columbia perform two legendary works at Miller Theatre on Saturday 25: Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky's Les Noces.

"I wanted it to be part of New York," Garafola says. "I also wanted it to be so inexpensive that students could see it." (Tickets for the general public are only $10.) In June, Garafola, the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, will curate a Diaghilev-themed exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. For the Miller Theatre showcase, she has paired a musical presentation of Les Noces with a rare performance of Afternoon of a Faun, based on Ann Hutchinson Guest's reconstruction.

Staged by Tina Curran, the 1912 ballet of sexual awakening set to Debussy will feature Michael J. Novak in the iconic Nijinsky role. "I knew I couldn't do a ballet that required vast numbers of men, because we don't have them, and in a lot of Diaghilev ballets there were sometimes more men than women," Garafola says. "I also had to think about what was possible to do in terms of sets and costumes. There was a lot of stuff in Diaghilev ballets. And we're limited financially and in terms of the stage, which is not terribly large. So I was very intrigued by doing Afternoon of a Faun. I felt it was possible."

Considered to be one of the first modern ballets, the short, potent work tells the tale of a young faun who finds himself in the company of several beautiful nymphs (like him, they move in profile). The faun, who finds a connection with one of the nymphs, concludes the dance with a masturbatory climax. At its Paris premiere, the work caused a scandal.

To cast the faun, an audition was held in November. "Michael just looked like a faun," she says, laughing. "I know this will sound very silly, but sometimes when I look at him in certain poses, I see Nijinsky a little bit, because of his coloring, because of where his weight is—that it's quite low—and also, Michael has had a lot of training with Paul Taylor, who has been fascinated with Nijinsky for many years." But Novak's stage experience was also key. "We knew that the faun was going to have to be someone who could stand the scrutiny of the audience and who understood how time can work onstage—that sometimes things go by so quickly and sometimes it seems everlasting."

Judging by a recent rehearsal, Novak is hauntingly good—at once precise and full of sexy languor. "At Columbia, I have taken five courses with Lynn Garafola, so through her love of the Diaghilev era I was able to learn a great deal," he says. "I watched the ballet in class; it's so simple and refined and subtle that it's easy to overlook all of the details. The more I watched it, the more I was taken into this world that doesn't look organic because all of the placement is so two-dimensional, yet there's this life to the movement and to the story line."

Last summer, Novak participated in a program at the Taylor School, where he learned some of the choreographer's Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal). "There's a lot of repertory within Paul Taylor that uses that twisted torso, that flat pelvis. So I had more experience than I expected in moving and jumping in that way. It's very stylized and awkward to do and to hold, and it's deceivingly complicated because your pelvis is facing one way and your shoulders are facing open and the inclination would be to hold that pose but if you don't breathe and find the relaxation, it tends to look very stale. You have to do it over and over and over to make it look organic."

For Novak, the dance, for all its brevity is incredibly dense. "Every step, every hand gesture, every head movement—because it's slow and deliberate—carries so much meaning," he says. "And it's important to know, as a performer, why you're turning your head, why your hand is making the gesture, that it is so that the audience gets a hint of what is happening as opposed to seeing a hand or a head move. That there's some meaning behind it. In the rehearsal process, that's what we've been working on: not doing the steps but trying to be the steps."

"Celebrating Diaghilev in Music and Dance" is at Miller Theatre Sat 25. The symposium, "Between Neoclassicism and Surrealism: Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the Context of the Russian-French Connection, 1900s–1920s" is Thu 23–Sat 25.

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