Hello, welcome to Queer as Fact, a Queer History podcast.

My name's Irene.

My name's Alice.

We're a fortnightly queer history podcast.

Each episode, one of us will discuss a topic about queer history from around the world.

This week, I'm going to talk about Vaslovnijinsky, a queer ballet dancer from Russia. We have a few content mornings for this episode.

We have mentions of schizophrenia, early 20th century mental health care and institutionalisation,

abusive relationships and unbalanced power dynamics within relationships.

If you don't want to hear any of that, then feel free to skip this episode.

We have more content coming up.

I'm starting with a brief introduction to who Nijinsky is and what his significance is.

He's considered the greatest male dancer of the early 20th century, which is to say at the time they thought he was the greatest male dancer that had ever happened in the world. They called him the god of dance. I like it. Yep. But there have

been some quite good Russian ballet dancers since then. And non-Russian ones? I mean, yes, but like...

You just looked at me like, why would a great ballet dancer not be Russian? He was a super good

dancer. He's really well known for doing like

spectacular death-difying jumps where everyone sort of looks and is like, what happens there?

How do you even do that? And this interviewer asks him after one of his first performances in

Paris whether it's difficult for him to do these impossible seeming jumps. And he's kind of

confused for a bit because his French isn't very good.

And eventually they get the message across and he goes, what?

Oh, the jumps?

No, not difficult at all.

...