Word: jarts
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...become a lawyer and went to Orléans for training. He eventually concluded that all lawyers are frauds and decided to become a legitimate fraud, which is to say an actor. He changed Poquelin to Moliére and fell in with a theatrical family, the Béjarts. With his mistress, Madeleine Béjart, he formed a company that toured the provinces for the next 15 years...
French Choreographer Maurice Béjart had a devil of a time casting his ballet rendition of Goethe's Faust. Who could play the aging hero, a scholar struggling to recapture his youth by bargaining with Mephistopheles? "There aren't many 50-year-old male dancers left," explains Béjart, who happens to be exactly 50. So, even though he hadn't danced onstage in nine years, Béjart decided that in the Broadway premiere of his Notre Faust, he himself would play the title role and Mephistopheles as well. Before his debut...
...legions of supporters, he is avant-garde and brilliant. To his many detractors, he is passé and boring. Actually, Choreographer Maurice Béjart of the Brussels-based Ballet of the 20th Century is all of those things. Part iconoclast, part P.T. Barnum, part aesthetic bluffer, Béjart deliberately gears his creations not to the sophisticated superegos of the modern dance audience but to the sensation-seeking ids of the young generation and the leisure class...
Nijinsky is Béjart's most ostentatious work to date. In it his flair for the spectacular, the mod and the grotesque is overwhelming, in ways that admittedly may whelm some more than others. Equipped with enough stage runways for a good suburban airport, adorned ominously by the obligatory -or so it seems these days-cross of Calvary, Nijinsky is essentially an old-fashioned allegory play dolled up for the stoned age. Its recounting of the life of the great Russian dancer is set to a schizoid musical score (electronics by Pierre Henry, schmalz by Tchaikovsky...
Opposed to him is Impresario Serge Diaghilev, who fires Nijinsky (Jorge Donn) for daring to marry Woman (Suzanne Farrell). Diaghilev symbolizes a false God who is at once greedy, arrogant and possessive. If Béjart's whole dramatic concept is embarrassingly commonplace, it obviously appealed to him as a chance to fashion the kind of mass ritual he likes best...