I became fascinated by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in my senior year in college thanks to a class run by the music department.* I had already been familiar with some of the music, and a few of the names. That class introduced me to the company as a convergence of modernisms in the hands of great artists, including designer Léon Bakst, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso (!), composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and Diaghilev himself, who elevated the role of impresario to an art form in itself. One artist was left out of the line-up: Nijinski’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, who was also a dancer with the company and an important choreographer in her own right.

It was another decade or more before I heard the name Bronislava Nijinska. Nijinska studied ballet in Saint Petersburg alongside her brother. Like her brother, she was a dancer in the Ballet Russe and she created a number of roles in ballets for the company. She choreographed several important works for the Ballets Russes, including Le Spectre de la Rose (featuring her brother), Les Noces (“The Wedding”) and Les Biches (literally “The Does”, also known as “The House Party”). (All of which we had studied in that college course, with no mention of the choreographer, though we did discuss Nijinski’s role in Le Spectre de la Rose.)

In 1925, she formed her own company, Théâtre Chorégraphic. She also created more than 60 ballets, not only for her own company but on commission for a number of other prominent dance companies of the period, including Anna Pavlova’s company. In 1938, she moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a school. She continued to work as a guest choreographer almost until her death in 1972.

Her works were experimental in form, and occasionally shocking in theme. (Les Biches explicitly explores the sexual mores of the 1920s.) She used, and expanded, modernist elements in dance, such as rhythmic complexity, innovative movements outside the vocabulary of classical ballet, and increasing abstraction.

 

She was never forgotten. But Nijinska’s long, productive career has been consistently overshadowed by that of her brother, who succumbed to mental illness at 29 and created only four ballets, including the astonishing The Rite of Spring, in which Nijinska danced the central role. In part, she was relegated to the shadows because only three of her works survive in full—a result of the fact the companies she worked for did not last so her works fell out of the dance repertory. The only work that has consistently been revived is Les Noces, despite his large cast (forty dancers) challenging style, and complex Stravinsky score.

But perhaps the style of her work has also played a role. She used the female body in unconventional ways, both as a choreographer and as a dancer.  Strong unconventional female voice consigned in the corners of history–who would have thought?

 

 

 

* Ballet caught my imagination long before I became a history bugg. One of my earliest memories is seeing a a dancer on television and knowing that was something I wanted to do.* I started taking lessons as soon as I was old enough, and because I was a budding history bugg I also started reading about the great dancers of the past. My interest in dance history continued long after an in-class accident ended my ability to continue with ballet.