Even in her lifetime, people had a habit of overlooking the talent of Bronislava Nijinska. Her famous brother Vaslav Nijinsky initially refused to recommend her to his lover Sergei Diaghilev when the impresario was signing up dancers for the 1909 Paris season of Ballets Russes. He didn’t introduce her to his friends, either and – in what can only be seen as an act of cruelty – took away her roles in the ballets she had helped him create.
Diaghilev himself, whom she regarded as a father figure, treated her with something like disdain, declaring: ‘I cannot have two geniuses of the dance from one family’, and asked her to dye her hair red ‘and dress more like a ballerina’. Even when she was the company’s leading choreographer, her face was omitted from the souvenir programmes. ‘Poor Bronislava had no luck with Diaghilev,’ Stravinsky said. Her ‘sex, looks and name were against her’.
Throughout a long and productive career, so it went on. While some people recognised her worth, others ignored her. When she died in 1972, aged 81, in California, which had become her home, the Times and the New York Times ran long, adulatory obituaries; but the Los Angeles Times published only an unsigned death notice, full of factual errors.
Yet Nijinska was, as Lynn Garafola argues in her introduction, ‘an architect of 20th-century neoclassicism’ and ‘a pioneer of the modern tradition in ballet’, whose career deserves attention ‘not only because of her accomplishments as a choreographer, teacher and dancer but also because it challenges the familiar grand narrative of 20th-century ballet history in the West’. That is what, in this ‘first book-length study of ballet’s premiere female choreographer’, the professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University sets out to provide.
‘Poor Bronislava had no luck with Diaghilev,’ said Stravinsky. ‘Her sex, looks and name were against her’
It’s an engrossing book, which gives full weight to an extraordinary life, but which also, as a subsidiary theme, questions how much Nijinska’s gender and her reluctance to play the game contributed not only to her neglect but also to the sheer, grinding relentlessness of her career.
Even Frederick Ashton, who adored her, and whose decision to ask her to mount her two most significant Diaghilev-era works, Les Noces and Les Biches, for the Royal Ballet in the 1960s did so much to cement their reputation, couldn’t quite record unequivocal praise.
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