John Neumeier: Ballet’s Guardian Angel

HAMBURG, TYSKLAND: There are few in the dance world as dedicated to the artform as John Neumeier. He has raised the Hamburg Ballet to international status and given them a vast repertoire of major ballets.

He has established a school, a youth company and is also one of the great conservers of our dance heritage through the Neumeier Foundation, founded in 2006.

I spoke to John Neumeier at the Foundation: part home part museum. When did your passion for collecting begin?

“I started collecting very young. In Milwaukee, where I was born, there were only visiting dance companies.  I had this instinctive feeling that dance was very important for me but I couldn’t define what it was. I was 11 when I used my pocket money to buy my first book, The Tragedy of Nijinsky. Reading the story about Nijinsky’s life, a dancer became a real person with a destiny and with all of the attributes of a human being.”

“Ballet was something very magical but very distant because, of course, I was sitting upstairs in the cheapest seats. I tried to define dance but I needed some sort of evidence and collected what books I could find. As a dancer in Stuttgart in the mid-60s I started to buy prints and romantic lithographs because you could find them quite reasonably at that time and the collection began to grow. By the time I came to Hamburg in 1973 I started to be interested in auctions.”

Your collection must be very valuable?

“For me, the point of the collection is information: what did the people of the time see when they saw dance? I don’t think of the collection as something which has a monetary value but rather for its value in continuing the tradition. Saving these works and piecing them together like a puzzle means that not only myself, but generations after me, will be able to look at them and study them.”

And the Nijinsky drawings?

“They suddenly became very important for me for this discrepancy between how Nijinsky was seen through the eyes of his contemporaries and how he, at the same moment, saw the world. The abstract drawings were made between 1917 and 1919. He had stopped dancing and was working in St Moritz by himself, quite desperate I think, because he couldn’t express himself as he used to. I think it was his absolute horror at the First World War that we see in the drawings.”

How does the artist link with the dancer?

“I went through various phases with Nijinsky. I was fascinated by the exotic, magnetic dancer with a great charisma: not only his technique but his presence must have been extraordinary. Then I reached a point where I appreciated what he was trying to do in choreography. He opened a new door to contemporary ballet and he was there before Martha Graham or Mary Wigman. With the publication of his diary we realised that here was an incredibly sensitive philosopher and then discovering the drawings, there was a fourth layer of information about this man."

"This is why I am so interested to have as many as possible – we now have, I think, 98 artworks. And they are not just scribblings of someone who is losing his mind: there is intention in them.”

While Nijinsky was a central part in the unique artistic synthesis of Diaghilev’s ballet productions he was a self-taught artist. Recently his art has begun to attract attention in its own right. Several of his paintings were included in the Inventing Abstraction exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2012. I asked if this was this the first time they were displayed in an art-historical context.

“No, in Hamburg in 2009 Nijinsky’s work was displayed with four other artists who were active in the same period. If the title had been in English it would have been Eye on Nijinsky – Nijinsky’s eye. He was an incredible draughtsman. Seeing the concrete drawings shows what a remarkable hand he had.”

In the catalogue to this exhibition Neumeier notes the relationship between avant-garde in choreography and in art. Michail Fokine’s Les Sylphides, a choreographed expression of the music that rejects narrative, finds its partner in abstract expressionism where pictorial forms find expression through the values of colour and form.

The Foundation also holds many images of Nijinsky from other artists including a drawing by Modigliani, a painting by Klimt and many sketches by Jean Cocteau. In a glass case there is a single petal from Nijinsky’s Spectre de la Rose costume and prominently placed is the famous bronze head of Nijinsky as Faun by Una Troubridge. A visit to the Neumeier Foundation is like visiting a past era where each remembrance is loved and cherished.

Maggie Foyer
8 September 2014