To those well-known cross-genre hurdles “writing about music” and “dancing about architecture,” you can add “acting about dancing.”
Theatre Gigante’s Isadora & Nijinsky, a dramatic profile of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky, faces great challenges from the get go. Do you dance, perhaps try to imitate the inimitable style of these great innovators? Do you document, heaping facts and images on the audience like a thorough biographer? Or do you impersonate, putting your subjects onstage and let them speak their mind and tell their story?
Mark Anderson, Isabelle Kralj and Ed Burgess, who created this new play, mostly choose the latter. But Isadora and Nijinsky isn’t just a bio-play. There are conversations about the nature of “art” and the place of art in the world, which certainly reflect the subject’s ideas, but also suggest a rose-colored nostalgia for times (unlike ours) when the arts got their due. There are puzzlingly extended lists of notables born in the same year as the dancers – a portrait of the times, I suppose.
These sections are thankfully augmented by Iain Court and Bethany Armstrong’s intensely colorful projections, all drawn from the neo-Fauvist paintings of Schomer Lichtner, a Wisconsin painter that seems to embody the Modern spirit, particularly when his paintings are magnified into broad swaths of dense color.
The biographical and aesthetic sketches at the beginning of the 90-minute piece form a sort of backdrop for the real meat of the play, two dramatic and beautifully written monologues that describe pivotal moments in each dancer’s life. 
For Duncan, it was the death of two of her children in a car accident. Kralj delivers it with a simple, meditative grace that lets the incident speak for itself. For Nijinsky, it’s the moment when he first became aware of his mental illness. For that scene, Anderson – playing a sort of narrator interviewer throughout the show – shares the description with Burgess, and they deliver the lines in a haunting, other-worldly slow motion.
These are the most dramatic moments of the evening, and they tell us more about the artists and what drove their creative process than the rest of the play. All together, Isadora and Nijinsky is a free-form trip down a modernist memory lane that captures its subjects in mostly sidelong glances. It succeeds only during those occasions when it stares its characters down and truly lets them speak from their creative and somewhat-tortured souls.
