The Horse Will Fall Forever: Nijinsky’s Kinetographies of Becoming
The Horse Will Fall Forever: Nijinsky’s Kinetographies of Becoming

Summary/Abstract: The article introduces Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming to research on the infamous, so-called Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary dancer and choreographer of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. In this document Nijinsky describes, among others, the walks he presumably took around St. Moritz in Switzerland in 1918-1919. The text was written when Nijinsky started developing symptoms of mental illness eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Yet in the article Nijinsky’s descriptions of walks are treated not as medical symptoms but as kinetographies of universal plasticity, in this case radically transforming the dancer’s identity or, better, disidentifying him as a site of becoming. It is the access that Nijinsky’s notebooks grant to a specific plane of kinetic experience which makes them of interest to the studies of human mobility, including dance. By deconstructing the peculiar character of plasticity the traces of which Nijinsky’s writing contains the article advances further the project of cultural kinesiology seen as vital component of performing arts theory and cultural analysis in general and situated on the crossing of philosophy and performance studies.

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