Au hommes

hommes, hommes, hommes

home     home     home

hommes, hommes, hommes

home     home     home

Je suis homme est un home

Je suis homme est un home

Je suis home avec lumiér

 

 

 So begins Nijinsky’s “To Mankind,” the longest and penultimate letter from a series of sixteen written in 1919 and composed during the writing of a diary that documents his movement towards what is believed to be chronic schizophrenia.

 

“To Mankind” appears in French in the 1999 translation of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Editor Joan Acocella describes these last letters, of which “To Mankind” is one, as untranslatable. They are “something barely readable—simply a sequence of sounds.” This freeing of language from meaning creates a text that is more interested in connecting words using persistent repetition, rhyme, and rhythm. The letter is a careful construction of sound where words, unanchored from their meanings, can be explored mainly for their relationship to the body; indeed one gets the sense when reading these letters that they are a means for Nijinsky to keep dancing, no matter the medium. In his translator’s preface, Kyril FitzLyon describes Nijinsky’s writing and its closeness to dance:

 

One feature of the poems that cannot be reproduced in translation is the very strong rhythms that mark his poems and to which he adheres irrespective of any meaning the poetry might or might not possess. These insistent rhythms may be a verbal expression of his experience as a dancer.

 

 The Fourth Notebook transforms Nijinsky’s letter into the rhythmical backbone for the construction of a choreography created and performed by dancer Benjamin Ord. Here, editing also becomes a choreographic tool, where quick cuts and fast repetition create a frenetic movement where the sounds of the dancer’s body tussle with the speaking voice.

 

This film uses Nijinsky’s words, written on the threshold between meaning and non-meaning, to operate as the rhythm to a work that collaborates with his last communications to create something new—a new choreography, a new meeting between archive and the contemporary body, a film that explores and questions the space and separation between things, reflecting Nijinsky’s understanding of the world as being “a single, unbroken whole.”