Famed Dancer’s Daughter . . . Reflects On A Century Of Her Father’s Tradition-Breaking Legacy

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Before international fame shone on Pope Francis, he was an easily ignored man wearing a Roman collar, seated on the everyday benches of the Buenos Aires subway.
A spotlight, when switched on, confers instant celebrity. But when the light’s not being brilliant, who knows who’s there in the next seat? So it goes with fame around the globe, not only for a to-be Argentine Pope.
How many future Hollywood stars bused tables in dim lighting first? How many, once they’re famous, wear dark glasses to try to get incognito?
For the second time in two and a half years, The Wanderer sat down recently with the unassuming daughter and granddaughter of tradition-shattering Waslaw Nijinsky, acclaimed as the world’s greatest male dancer in the early 20th century. He was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in the late 19th century.
Like the April 2012 interview, this chat was at a pizza restaurant at 24th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix, a few blocks from where the hearty 94-year-old Tamara Nijinsky still attends Mass at least twice a week at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church.
No beaming spotlights at this restaurant table, just two women and a writer talking for an hour and 40 minutes on October 3.
Well, what’s new? Tamara and her daughter, Kinga Gaspers, say they attended the 100th anniversary performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris last year, invited by the French government.
With the music composed by Russian Igor Stravinsky and dance choreographed by Waslaw Nijinsky, The Rite of Spring, debuting in Paris in 1913, was the beginning of modern ballet, the women explain.
There was a restive artistic spirit abroad then, a ferment in creativity, casting off everyday behaviors. The surrealist artist Pablo Picasso would be another example.
The path to Nijinsky’s acclaim had rough patches. A riot broke out in the theater over The Rite of Spring. “The artists loved it but the aristocracy despised it,” Tamara says, commenting earlier in the interview, “It’s not the regular classical ballet. Very primitive Russian costumes.” And, Kinga adds, “rough” dance movements. “They did away with all conventions.”
Kinga says that “the music was very revolutionary.” The performance “was at least 50 years ahead of its time because people didn’t like it and didn’t understand it,” although today this approach would be considered “no big deal.”
“What was empowered was the spirit of New Modernism,” she says.
Tamara, who speaks four languages, says she received three medals from the French beginning in 2000, the first two in recognition of her father’s achievements, and the third, in 2013, honoring her work to keep his memory alive.
Kinga hopes to find a producer for a completed screenplay that would correct errors about her grandfather and his wife, born Romola de Pulszky. “We want this to be a major production, an indie film.”
Nijinsky and his sister were baptized at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw, the same church where the composer Frederic Chopin’s heart is in a silver urn. Later, the Catholic Romola would refer to the Infant Jesus of Prague as her “business partner.”
During the previous Wanderer interview, on April 26, 2012, Tamara said her father became so closely identified with the characters he portrayed that people didn’t recognize him when they saw him walking down the street “in civilian clothes. . . . He looked totally insignificant,” in contrast to his commanding stage presence.
The dancer’s career was cut short while he still was relatively young. He began to develop mental illness in 1919, the year before Tamara, his second daughter, was born. Nijinsky was in and out of treatment facilities for three decades while Romola cared for and defended him, even taking him to Lourdes in hopes of a cure.
“It was Romola who kept his spirit alive, kept his legacy alive,” Kinga says.
Citing medical advances since her father’s day, Tamara says during the October 3 interview that if he had lived later, he might have been able to spend his last decades differently.
“I am convinced,” Tamara says, “that with today’s medication, maybe he . . . could write choreography all right” and “live in his own home and function,” even though his dance career still would have ceased.
He died in London in 1950, was buried there, then was reinterred in Paris’ Montmartre Cemetery in 1953 because his fame began in the French capital, with the Ballets Russes.
Although writers often spell his first name “Vaslav,” Tamara says he always signed it “Waslaw.”
Tamara says he was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic although he was manic-depressive.

Trying To Survive

With the arrival of World War One, aristocracies fell, and totalitarians arose in the wreckage.
Later in the interview, the women recall their life under the Communist hammer in Hungary in the mid-20th century.
As a youngster, “I was taught religion in secret” and attended Sunday Mass in a basement, Kinga says. “. . . I was always told you don’t talk about this in school. You don’t carry your rosary. . . . I never thought that I would ever see Communism fall.”
Tamara recalls life in a communal apartment, with three different families being housed in the three bedrooms. They’re all strangers assigned there by the government, and all share the same bathroom and kitchen — and maybe a government Communist spy among them.
At the workplace, the boss kept a special book on the people he oversaw. If something got his attention, there could be a knock on the door at home at night.
There wasn’t much talk about Nijinsky at this time, Tamara says. “We were trying to survive.” Receiving a letter sent from the United States was a cause for worry.
Tamara’s mother, Romola, was living in the U.S. at that point and wrote to ask about some pearl earrings. “I will go to jail” over getting letters like this, Tamara says she feared.
Kinga explains that the Communist government would wonder why it wasn’t given the earrings, “for the cause.”
Heavily censored letters that people received had almost everything crossed out, Kinga says. “That was the bad old days.”
Tamara recalls having to stand in long lines just to get a ticket to obtain a loaf of bread. After a person went through a second line to receive the actual bread, it might be all gone.
A revolt against Communist oppression, the Hungarian Uprising of October 1956, failed when Soviet invasion troops moved in, but Tamara and Kinga managed to arrive in Canada in 1957. In 1961 Tamara came to Phoenix, where she has remained.

An Artistic Vision

As for the proposed movie that she hopes to find a producer for, titled Madame Nijinsky, Kinga tells The Wanderer that she wants it to show Nijinsky wasn’t a homosexual, as is sometimes alleged, and that Romola wasn’t responsible for his mental breakdown, nor did she attach herself to him only seeking fame and fortune.
“Romola really has been wronged by history, and I’d like to correct that,” Kinga says, “and [show] that Waslaw was not homosexual, that was something he had to do because of the circumstances he lived in.”
Her reference to “the circumstances” pertains to young dancers of both sexes being passed along for their superiors’ sexual gratification, an experience that Nijinsky expressed his regret over in his unexpurgated diary.
When his dance impresario learned that Nijinsky married Romola, the impresario is said to have flown into a rage and dismissed Nijinsky from the dance company.
Commenting that divorce “would have been the easy way out” for Romola if she only had wanted her husband’s fame and money, Kinga says “Romola loved Waslaw and what Waslaw was creating. . . . She saw his genius” and was as dedicated to his artistic vision of the New Modernism as he was.
A two-page backgrounder on the proposed movie says Romola “wants to be part of his revolution — breaking down the barriers between genders, nation-states, and old cultural hatreds in favor of Vaslav’s [sic] extraordinary belief in our shared humanity.”
The backgrounder says 21-year-old Romola, from a celebrated arts family in Budapest, “opens our script already a Sorbonne-educated, multilingual fan of the New Modernism sweeping Europe. She sees Vaslav [sic] Nijinsky transform himself into the sad puppet in the ballet Petrushka, and sees immediately why he will be the star of the famous Ballets Russes and a leading light for New Modernism in the arts.”
Kinga says that when her own son had attended elementary school at St. Theresa Parish in Phoenix, the youngster took a huge coffee-table book to class one day showing his great-grandfather in his various roles.
His teacher later told Kinga that her students always laud the family member they choose to talk about as being “the greatest,” but that definitely was true of Nijinsky.
On the other hand, Kinga says this son, now grown, and his wife have three children, ranging from two to six years old, but they’re not going to learn who their great-great grandfather is until their parents decide to tell them.
As our interview comes to a close, the healthy-looking but elderly Tamara says she has something to ask of me.
Suddenly the revolutionary century of changes and battles disappears and she makes a very traditional request, Catholic to Catholic. Will I please pray for her for a happy death?