Credit: Simon Schluter
He’s been called “pope of ballet” in his adopted Germany, and when John Neumeier last year stepped down as head of the Hamburg Ballet, he’d been in the role for a stunning 51 years. He could credibly lay claim to being the world’s longest serving artistic director, but retire? Forget about it. Many his age dream of travelling the world and soaking up its cultural wonders. Why quit when that’s your day job?
He’s celebrating his 86th birthday in Melbourne, having just arrived to teach dancers of the Australian Ballet his modern classic Nijinsky.
Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Neumeier’s fascination with dance was sparked by the film musicals his mother took him to see. His school picked up on his talents as a visual artist and gave him extra lessons in drawing and painting, but dance continued to exert some strange attraction.
“I didn’t really know what it was. In the local library there were probably five books on dance, and one of them was called The Tragedy of Nijinsky,” he says.
He pored over the biography of the world’s most famous male dancer, and it set something in motion that hasn’t waned in the decades since. “It made Nijinsky a person. I’d experienced ballet sitting very high up in the gallery, looking down at a beautiful world, but not really knowing how to get into it, or that they were, in fact, human beings. Nijinsky made it personal for me, made it human. That was the beginning.”
In between the years of his formal dance education, Neumeier earned a degree in literature. His understanding of great writing is evident both in the works he’s adapted – ballets based on everything from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Tennessee Williams – and the keen sense of drama and pathos that are imbued within them.
In his early years, he danced for the Stuttgart Ballet, but even then, he knew he was destined to make his own work. “I don’t think that you decide to be a choreographer,” he says. “I think you are a choreographer or you’re not. It’s inborn. From the beginning of my work as a dancer I always saw that things could be different, that they could be done in another way.”
He was just 30 when he was named director of the Frankfurt Ballet, and a few years later he took over the Hamburg Ballet. “I had no plan. I had nothing. I just wanted to create. All I thought was how to do the next best work.”
Jake Mangakahia and Grace Carroll in the Australian Ballet’s production Nijinsky.Credit: Kate Longley
He might be downplaying things. It wasn’t long before Neumeier’s work at his new post transformed the Hamburg Ballet into a company that demanded the world pay attention. He established a ballet school there, began international tours for the first time and turned Hamburg into a ballet town. One of his contemporaries has said that “everyone – but everyone – in Hamburg knows John Neumeier”.
Even from those initial years Neumeier’s work was characterised by a striking and palpable sense of emotion. His ballets might be intellectually vigorous and technically demanding, but they’re firstly designed to move the heart.
“I would define dance as the living shape of emotion,” he says. “It’s really important because we’re people communicating with people. That means we both have the same instrument. It’s just that those on the stage have it more fine-tuned, so they can express many things.”
For Neumeier, the elite physiques of the world’s top dancers aren’t supposed to offer us an escape from our own more limited bodies. “The people who are watching should recognise something of themselves in what they see, and therefore be thankful to be there, to have had this experience that they are maybe not alone.”
Neumeier’s fascination with Nijinsky has continued to this day, and he’s created a number of ballets across the decades that take the dancer/choreographer as his subject. Though no footage of Nijinksy dancing exists, his influence on ballet has rippled out in the hundred years since he last performed.
His Afternoon of a Faun, for instance, was the first ballet in which every movement was completely choreographed, leaving nothing to improvisation. His follow-up, Jeux, was the first in modern dress and the first to be created without a libretto.
The Australian Ballet’s Grace Carroll and Jake Mangakahia.Credit: Kate Longley
Even a lot of what we imagine when we talk about “classical ballet” is heavily inflected by innovations that took place only in the last century or so. “For sure,” says Neumeier. “Tastes change without us knowing. Even memory is a very interesting thing because it sometimes leads us to exaggeration because you remember something a certain way, and then you try to make it more of what you remember.”
But while he might have been at it much longer than most, Neumeier doesn’t claim to be a chronicler of those changing tastes in ballet over the past half-century. “There are people who observe and write about, and there are people who do. I have been a doer. I’ve created about 176 works, so I haven’t had much time only to observe ... I’m like a dog with a bone. I don’t really look right and left.”
One of the choreographer’s enduring goals is more commonly the touchstone for people a quarter his age: relevance. He’s constantly tweaking the details of his works to make sure they feel fresh and alive. “The only rule is that I watch the piece to see if it moves me, and if I feel it is relevant.”
Though he might be one of the great choreographers of our era, he’s also notable for being there to oversee every production of his works. He has collaborated with many of the world’s most distinguished ballet companies, from Vienna to Winnipeg, Copenhagen to Chicago, but he’s never just left them to their own devices.
Why does he insist on this hands-on approach?
“Because I’m a living choreographer – thank god – I feel the importance of dance as a living art,” he says. “Although I’m a great collector of dance material, I don’t feel that I want to put my own work in a museum. I feel that my own work lives through the dancers.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO JOHN NEUMEIER
- Worst habit? Impatience.
- Greatest fear? Not to be creative.
- The line that stayed with you? “My candle burns at both ends, it shall not last the night, but ah, my friends, and all my foes, it gives a lovely light.” (Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay).
- Biggest regret? That I did not buy the Nijinsky diary when it was in my hands.
- Favourite book? Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? There are two drawings of Nijinsky by (Philip) Malyavin, which I wished I owned.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I don’t know.
But Neumeier’s insistence on being personally involved with every production of his ballets does leave a giant question mark over the shape that his own legacy will take. Has anybody ever staged a John Neumeier work without John Neumeier?
“Never. I do have quite a large group of ballet masters, women and men, who set my work, who study my work, who are constantly in contact with me. I hope that they will do a good job.”
Thankfully, the ballet world needn’t face the prospect of Neumeier exiting the stage any time soon. He’s as busy as he’s ever been, his retirement from the Hamburg Ballet only freeing him up to gallivant all over the globe as a freelance choreographer. There’s no secret to his tirelessness, he says.
“When I close my eyes I’m about 42. You just have to keep going and you have to love what you’re doing, even if it is sometimes exhausting, depressing. It’s usually exhilarating.”
The Australian ballet’s Nijinsky is at the Regent Theatre until March 1.