Faun

Jed Gregorio’s Faun: Ébauche d’un portrait de jeune homme en trois actes (Sketch for a Portrait of a Young Man in Three Acts) reinterprets the amalgamated work of three prominent male figures in the Western canon of modernism: Vaslav Nijinsky, Claude Debussy, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In 1912, Nijinsky choreographed The Afternoon of a Faun for the Ballets Russes, first performed in Paris. The dance was set to Debussy’s orchestral score Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, composed in 1894, which was inspired by Mallarmé’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun, published in 1876. In Gregorio’s Faun, this gesture of transposition in contemporaneous experience is held against mirrors of sex, dance, poetry, translation, and music. As an experiment, Faun presents the lone figure of the young man and his ontological fallibility as he confronts the behemoth of art history as well as the paradoxes of beauty and terror, familiarity and foreignness, and defeat and hope.