Washington Square
Nureyev’s Washington Square was based on Henry James’ novel of the same name. Originally published in 1880, the novel tells the story of Catherine, a shy, dowdy young heiress pressured by her widowedfather, Dr Austin Sloper, to reject the gold-digging suitor with whom she has fallen in love. The repercussions of this deep conflict follow Catherine throughout her life.
Choreographing a novel from scratch is a daunting challenge, but it was the opportunity to explore the tangled psychology of the characters’ interior lives through dance that so excited Nureyev. He began work on the libretto with the screen writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, widely celebrated for his work with the film director, Luis Buñuel. Nureyev chose music by the American Modernist composer, Charles Ives, known for his experiments with quarter tones, polytonality, and tone-clusters. Ives’ often irony-laden compositions were marked by a mélange of martial drums and piping flutes, brass bands, and organ music. The sets were by Antoni Taulé and the costumes by Nureyev’s frequent collaborator, Nicholas Georgiadis.
Nureyev’s biographer Julie Kavanagh wrote that the ballet’s opening night at the Paris Opéra was a devastating disappointment. Ives’ hectic dissonance, combined with the formality and restraint of James’ characters, did nothing to convey the undercurrent of psychological conflict necessary to express the story. The fussy, overwrought choreography did not help to advance the narrative, which was soon dizzyingly muddled. Even the most enthusiastic ballet fans were bewildered. Over the course of the production, a brass band, sixteen ballerinas dressed as the Statue of Liberty, uniformed soldiers, hard-bitten pioneers, swaggering cowboys, prim pilgrims and a host of other figures plucked from the dusty pages of history books appeared. The ultimate effect was of a Halloween parade. The narrative was lost under the relentless deluge of caricatures. Technical issues with the set design meant that half the audience couldn’t see what was happening onstage. When the curtain fell, the theatre erupted into disdainful boos.
The ballet’s poor reception was frustrating and distressing to Nureyev. He had been seriously ill during much of the creative process but had nevertheless worked at relentless pace. However, the reviews were not all negative. Writing in the New York Times about the ballet’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House in July 1986, dance critic Anna Kisselgoff admired Nureyev’s performance in his own Graham-inspired choreography, as Dr Sloper. Charles Jude’s dramatic turn as the gold-digging suitor, Florence Clerc as the awkward, emotionally trammeled Catherine, and Clotilde Vayer as Catherine’s maiden aunt also received praise. As an exercise in translating an internalised story of psychological nuance to an externalised form of physical expression, Washington Square was an interesting experiment.However, its brief flashes of brilliance were not enough to redeem the production, and the ballet is no longer performed today.