Page:The Art of Nijinsky.djvu/134

NIJINSKY ballet is deliberate in the extreme. The attitudes of the dancers evolve with the measured inevitability of a slowly-turned kaleidoscope, and as for lightness—the whole performance is a studied demonstration of the attractive force of the earth and of the triumph of gravity. I have heard that if we were transported all at once to a planet like Jupiter, much greater in bulk than our earth, the sense of bodily weight would be so increased that we should find it difficult to walk upright. Such apparently is the feeling of the people in Le Sacre du Printemps. The earth seems like an enormous magnet which continually drags them downwards to itself, and such leapings as they do from time to time indulge in cannot result from any aspiring liveliness of spirit, but are traceable, more probably, to their wish to encourage, by 96