Jeux (Games) is a one-act "poème dansé" made for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with music by Claude Debussy and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. Debussy wrote the score in about a month in 1912 after Diaghilev doubled his fee to secure it; the ballet premiered on 15 May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées under Pierre Monteux, only weeks before the same company's premiere of The Rite of Spring, which immediately overshadowed it.
What is danced
The article does not describe Nijinsky's actual choreographic vocabulary — no steps, positions, holds or technique are recorded, only the scenario and the musical structure that underpinned it. What can be drawn from the source is the scenario's physical action: a boy and two girls search for a lost tennis ball at dusk, play hide-and-seek, chase and catch one another, quarrel, sulk, and finally embrace before being startled apart by a second ball thrown from offstage. The score is built from very short motifs (often two measures, sometimes one) and around sixty tempo changes, described by Vuillermoz as shifting speed and nuance every two measures — a musical fragmentation that would have demanded equally fragmented, quick-shifting phrasing from the dancers, though the article stops short of describing how Nijinsky actually realised this on stage.
Context
Jeux was made in the immediate wake of Nijinsky's L'Après-midi d'un faune and just ahead of the Ballets Russes' Rite of Spring, placing it at the centre of the company's most experimental and controversial season. Diaghilev originally wanted the piece to carry a homosexual subtext among three men, and Nijinsky reportedly wanted to include an airplane crash; the produced version was diluted into a heterosexual tennis-garden scenario with one man and two women, an indication of how far the ballet's content was negotiated and softened before it reached the stage. Its poor initial reception, followed almost immediately by the far larger scandal of the Rite of Spring premiere two weeks later, meant Jeux was quickly sidelined in the historical record despite its musical innovation.
Staging history
The article gives no detailed stage history or list of revivals; it notes only that a critical edition of the score was prepared by Pierre Boulez and Myriam Chimènes and published in 1988, and cites Millicent Hodson's 'Nijinsky's Bloomsbury Ballet: Reconstruction of Dance and Design for Jeux' (2008), which implies a modern reconstruction effort but is not itself described in the text.
How to watch it
Listen for the score's constant tempo and motif changes — the article counts roughly sixty tempo markings, changing character every couple of bars — and watch for how (or whether) a staging translates that restlessness into equally clipped, interrupted physical phrases rather than sustained balletic line. Attend to the scenario's ambiguity: the piece stages a tennis-ball game and a suppressed erotic charge between three young people, cut short by an unseen intruder, rather than a conventional narrative arc.
Credits
- composer: Claude Debussy