„The clown of god“ has it’s roots in the last public performance of the legendary Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1888-1950) in 1919 and traces the torturous course of the brilliant dancer’s life trough fame, fear, lethargy and insanity. It describes his suffering and the time he spent in the St. Moritz psychiatric hospital where, gradually losing his sanity, he wrote his diary and gave his last ever public performances at the Swiss Suvretta House with the pianist Bertha Asseo.
„The Clown of god“ shows Nijinsky’s last desperate struggle against his incurable illness, before memory, strength and the spark of life were extinguished. „This dance strives to explore the terrible limit of human existence. How appalling it must be for victims, and those who suffer with them, to have to watch as, in a physiologically intact, young, strong and beautiful body, the central control system goes awry and the functions of the brain become biomechanically uncoupled from the body. Insensibility, aimlessness, fear, persecution mania, distraction and lethargy are the mad external manifestations of these terrible internal mental processes. How does this illness start? Why is it incurable?
Doctors, scientists and we, the ‘clowns of god’, have no answer. This performance is dedicated to
Waslaw Nijinsky, the legend of dance.“
Dietmar und Gregor Seyffert