Nijinsky and Isadora, a meeting of minds

Between 1977 and 1981, Steve Allen produced and PBS aired 24 episodes of Meeting of Minds. The premise: What if (say) Napoleon, Cleopatra, Confucius and Charlie Chaplin got together to discuss the Big Issues? So B-list actors, usually including Allen’s wife, the lovely but not especially talented Jayne Meadows, would don accents and, armed with quotations woven into self-consciously elevated dialogue, discuss the meaning of life.

Sorry for the long wind-up. Here’s the pitch: As I sat through Theatre Gigante’s Isadora and Nijinsky Thursday evening, I couldn’t help thinking of Meeting of Minds. Both are just earnest enough to appear naive, just prosaic enough to be dull, just poetic enough to feel effete, just ambitious enough to be pretentious. Both are fatally static. Worst of all, both lack the panache that might make us believe, for even a minute, that we are in the presence of important people.

Isadora Duncan, a founding mother of modern dance and a notorious free spirit, always had plenty to say about everything. She got a few things right, especially on women’s rights. But the rest of it was late-Romantic twaddle. Isabelle Kralj does Isadora no favors by quoting her at great length in the course of this show. Isadora, by all accounts, moved in ways that electrified her audiences and ultimately freed dancers to think about their art in new ways. She did change everything, but absolutely no one cares about her opinions of the citizens of Boston c. 1905. We hear plenty about that in this show.

You can’t get at Isadora’s essence by talking. The movement endures, and it’s accessible; a small academic dance industry is busy researching and reconstructing Isadora’s numbers.  Anyone who would impersonate her had better move in ways that at least give us a hint of what all the shouting was about a century ago. But Kralj’s dancing days are gone. She has nothing for us but the twaddle.

Nijinsky’s meteoric career peaked with The Rite of Spring in 1914. By 1919, he had gone insane. Ed Burgess, as Nijinsky, moves a little more and has more presence than Kralj. His dialogue comes partly from the diaries Nijinsky wrote feverishly in an asylum in Switzerland. Joan Accocella edited and published them a few years ago. I tried to read that book, but the ravings of a lunatic defeat attention. They didn’t make any more sense coming from Burgess than they did on the page. I could see Burgess succeeding in a one-man show about Nijinsky, one in which he could really let go as a dancer. As opposed to quoting Nijinsky’s ideas about coal production, as he did Thursday.

The two co-wrote the piece with Mark Anderson, who played the bow-tied narrator/documentarian. Anderson splits his time between raining buckets of historical facts at the audience and asking loopy questions of the two immortals. The interviews never quite get anywhere and often repeat what Anderson has already conveyed in his monologues. They seem to have a particular obsession with what other immortal was born in their birth years of 1890 (Nijinsky) and 1877 (Isadora). It’s enlightening to know that Herman Hesse, Louis Renault and Duncan share birth years, but the list went on and on for both dancers, and that’s not good theater. That’s what Google is for.

Anderson and Kralj, the creative team that is Theatre Gigante, have done some great things — A Night at the Movies (2009), for example. But Isadora and Nijinsky is one of those what-were-they-thinking? evenings.

Isadora and Nijinsky continues at 8 p.m. Thursday through Satuday, 2 p.m. Sunday, May 5-8, in Studio 508 of UWM’s Kenilworth Square East, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place (at Prospect Ave.) Tickets are $26.50, seniors $21.50, and students $11.50. Call the UWM Peck School of the Arts box office, 414 229-4308.