‘I played very nervously today’: A Molecular Analysis of Vaslav Nijinsky's 1919 Dance of Crisis

Vaslav Nijinsky's infamous 1919 St. Moritz recital and his notebooks, published as The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, often are read as symptoms of the dancer's progressive mental illness. At the same time, however, they perform what Nijinsky calls chuvstvo (feeling), a configuration of affects in the Deleuzian sense of the term. Opting for an affective rather than a symptomatic reading of the 1919 recital and Nijinsky's writings, this article adapts key concepts of schizoanalysis (becoming, desiring-machine, body-without-organs) to deconstruct Nijinsky's performance as becoming-intense, while advocating a molecular approach in studying dances of crises in effect. The preliminary goal of the study is to outline how the dancer and eyewitnesses perceived the forces that drove the performance and the dancer's relationship with the audience. Based on these accounts, the main part of the analysis configures Nijinsky's dancing as a solitary desiring-machine producing a body-without-organs (which he calls God Nijinsky) that radiates chuvstvo. As such, the recital becomes a case for dance theory mapping the rhizomes of kinetic becoming. By looking at Nijinsky's St Moritz dance and his writing via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the article argues for a nuanced and non-reductionist approach to any dance of crisis; a symptom perhaps but, in any case, an expression of life's dynamism and complexity.