Fresh from the Grahamstown National Arts Festival having won a 2017 Standard Bank Ovation Award in excellence, and the SATMag Award for Best Cutting Edge Production 2017, Leftfoot productions offers NIJINSKY’S WAR. 

Through adapting The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky (1953), NIJINSKY'S WAR offers a subjective view into Nijinsky's life and his ongoing struggle with mental illness, through a combination of theatre, film and dance. 

Nijinsky, who is cited as the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century, was celebrated for his virtuosity and depth of characterizations. Tragically he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to various asylums for the last 30 years of his life. The production reimagines Nijinsky after he has been committed to a mental asylum. In this state of limbo, Nijinsky re-lives his best moments in dance, from L'après-midi d'un faune (1912) to the controversial Jeux (1913), and finally the sacrificial ritual Le Sacre du Printemps (1913). NIJINSKY'S WAR parallels Nijinsky and Ignatius Van Heerden’s life; growing up as a farm boy in South Africa, and his journey becoming a dancer and choreographer.

Photographs by Suzy Bernstein

Check out NIJINSKY'S WAR on youtube.

Audience Responses

Awesome performance!

Brilliant cutting edge theatre!

Our first disappointment at PopArt. Can't win 'em all Multi-media can work but in this case it was simply sensory overload (exacerbated by the outrageously loud static noise accompanying the epilepsy-inducing photo-collage) The inset video of Nijinsky reading, combined with the projection, made it almost impossible to focus on the dance. The surtitles were particularly distracting. I may be unusual but I find writing on the screen impossible to ignore. The overall impression left by the production was of a rather pedestrian recounting of Nijinsky's life, overlaid towards the end with a self-indulgent account of the performer's motivation. Maggots consuming the rabbit and the projected eyes were for me a self-conscious reference to the surrealists which did very little to elucidate Nijinsky's life. A better production which explores Nijinsky's decent into madness, his hetero and homo-sexual relationships and the strictures of pre-WW1 European life is in there somewhere. I liked the reading of Nijinsky's memoirs, which could have been more prominent. How about doing that as a "Naked Humans Reading" evening.