At just twenty-two, Vaslav Nijinsky—dancer, choreographer, and cultural sensation—posed for the seventy-two-year-old Auguste Rodin. The session took place in July 1912, just a month after L’Après-midi d’un faune had shaken Paris. The result was not merely a sketch, but a rare collision of two radical modern imaginations. In attempting to capture the fleeting physical intensity of Nijinsky’s faun, Rodin translated the ephemerality of dance into sculptural form—immortalizing a performance that could never be fully preserved.

Despite his young age, Nijinsky was already recognized not only as a famous dancer of Les Ballets Russes but also as an avant-garde choreographer responsible for the scandalous novelty of the ballet L’Après-midi d’un faune, created to the music by Debussy. It is known that Rodin attended and enthusiastically applauded the second performance of L’Après-midi d’un faune at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in June 1912. Like many others in the audience, Rodin must have been captivated by the “live” image of untamed sexuality, eroticism, and animality created by a muscular, slightly chubby Slav clad in a tight bodice, who lingered on a slope in the gorgeous stage set executed by Leon Bakst.

Witnessing such a performance was to live through a moment of modernity claiming its radical break with the past in real time. None of the reconstructions of Nijinsky’s choreography today can recapture that moment, can restitute the childlike joy of undoing the lessons of academic dance achieved by Nijinsky on stage—whose body became at once a medium and a form. Framed by the imaginary “archaic” invented by the classicizing minds of Debussy and Bakst, Nijinsky-as-faun provoked a phenomenological type of encounter between the viewer and the living object, whose untamed positions had little in common with the aesthetic of dance.

Rodin’s sculptural imagination, perhaps, was wandering between the states of fascination and irritation when he saw the performance. The sculptor was already interested in various forms of dance, such as traditional Balinese and the improvisations of Isadora Duncan—but these were different visual and choreographic experiences. With Nijinsky’s faun, however, the immaterial matter of dance as une sorte d’espace-temps, to invoke Paul Valéry’s formulation, became more acutely locked in the material body of the dancer, the carrier of its originality. With every performance of his faun, Nijinsky forged a new original of his own choreography, because a human body never replicates itself—even in the most practiced and memorized procedures.

Sculpture, in the eyes of Rodin, could only aspire to capture that revolving temporality.
In real life, Nijinsky’s body was a far cry from “the ideal,” but he had a distinct profile and volume in flesh—muscles and sinews—packed into a height of five foot three. His body was not that of le danseur noble, but it did possess powerful kinetics and fluidity. Off stage, he was a polite and gregarious person, undergoing rapid acculturation during the European tours of Les Ballets Russes. Diagilev and Bakst dragged him through all major European museums wherever the company stopped. The stage image of the faun emerged as the result of studying museum objects such as ancient reliefs, vases, and sculptures. Yet the faun on stage had shed the museum veneer and was reborn in all of his natural instincts.

In his diary—which might have been a stunning literary document of modernism, had it not been “cleaned” by his wife Romola—Nijinsky expressed regret over the moment of masturbating on stage that he, as the faun, had to perform according to his own choreography.

In his sketch, Rodin preferred the wild, ecstatic vision of the dancer: he twisted his body into an extreme contrapposto, revealed the bulging muscles, and elongated the spine, making Nijinsky’s faun into a kind of early human species rather than a mythic creation, a dream from the past. Moreover, the sculptor took revenge on dance’s temporality by fixing his model in a one-legged position (which had no roots in Nijinsky’s choreography), bending the dancer’s right leg to the level of his left shoulder and placing the foot in the dancer’s left arm. Rodin had, in this case, no desire to sculpt someone else’s choreography, but his own. The ephemeral art of dance, transformed into no less fragile plaster, became a living form once again. Rodin did not capture the dance of Nijinsky, but an image of a one-legged faun that the dancer evoked for him.
What, however, is so compelling in this ordinary sketch executed by Rodin? Is it the moment in July 1912 when he was visited by a young star whose career would last only until 1916? Is it a twist of modernity that constructed Nijinsky’s ephemeral moment of dance as the “beautiful masculinity” of the new century—when dance as a medium could not have been fixed in its entirety by any existing means? (Nijinsky was never filmed dancing beyond a few seconds.) Is it the ephemerality of dance itself—as the faun’s “sleep,” invented only two years before World War I, became an image that would terrorize the dancer’s fragile imagination through the decades of his “insanity”? Was it the moment of aesthetic valorization of modernity, expressed through the utopia of dance—the synthesis of the modern and archaic—projected onto a collapsing Europe? The encounter of the arts—ephemeral as dance and essentially material as sculpture—perpetuates these questions along with the desire to look further into answers.