Bronislava Nijinska

Bronislava Nijinska made Les Noces and Les Biches, is the only woman among the major choreographers of the Ballets Russes, and spent most of the twentieth century known chiefly as her brother's sister. She trained at the Imperial school alongside Vaslav, danced with the company from 1909, and resigned with him when Diaghilev dismissed him in 1913. She helped him mount L'Apres-midi d'un faune and understood his method well enough to reconstruct parts of it later, which is much of why any of it survives. Stranded in Kyiv through the revolution, she ran a school and wrote a manifesto on movement; Diaghilev brought her back in 1921 as choreographer. Les Noces in 1923, to Stravinsky, is the result: a Russian peasant wedding staged as something closer to a rite than a celebration, danced in brown and white with the corps in blocks and pyramids and the bride's hair braided to the floor, and it looks more like the twentieth century than anything else the company made. Les Biches the following year is its opposite, all wit and ambiguity. She worked afterwards across Europe and America for forty years, staged for de Basil's company and for Markova and Dolin, and settled in California. Frederick Ashton called her the greatest influence on his own work. Her memoirs, unfinished, were published after her death. Les Noces took four years to reach the stage because Stravinsky kept revising the instrumentation, finally settling on four pianos and percussion. She choreographed the Reinhardt film of A Midsummer Night s Dream in Hollywood in 1935. Her school in Los Angeles trained dancers for decades.

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