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The Art of Nijinsky is a 1913 book by Geoffrey Whitworth with illustrations by Dorothy Mullock.
Whitworth examines the art and career of the Russian ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who has been described as the greatest male dancer of the early twentieth century. As part of its coverage of Nijinsky, the book also touches on Russian ballet in general. Whitworth himself was the founder of the British Drama League, a campaigner for a National Theatre in the UK and an important figure in his own right in the history of British theatre. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of this book.
The last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1910, contains an excellent little essay on the Ballet, which ends, after bewailing the modern degeneracy of the art, with these ill-omened words:
"It seems unlikely that we shall see any revival of the best period and style of dancing until a higher standard of grace and manners becomes fashionable in society. Only in an atmosphere of ceremony, courtesy, and chivalry can the dance maintain itself in perfection."
Well, it is a dangerous thing to be a prophet; and that this particular prophet has proved most happily at fault will be plain to everyone. The passage is quoted here, however, not at all for the simple pleasure of refuting it, but rather because it aptly indicates some of those more than ordinary difficulties which lie in wait for any English critic of the Russian Ballet. For it must be remembered that our author of the Encyclopædia was hardly, if at all, behind the times in which he wrote. M. Diaghilew's company did not make its first appearance in London till the summer of 1911, and though before then there had been considerable evidence of a revival in individual dancing, concerted dancing on a definite theme (which we may take as a practical definition of the ballet) had seldom reached a lower stage of insignificance. In those days, few even of the best informed among the critics were aware of what was going on in Russia, and it is scarcely strange that London's first experience of the Russian Ballet took the majority of us utterly by surprise.