The Brilliant Career of Bronislava Nijinska

Born in Minsk in 1891 to two Polish dancers, Bronislava travelled as a young child with her parents and elder brother Vaslav across Russia, touring and performing in shows. This early exposure to Polish folk dance and circus acrobatics would influence both siblings’ subversive, minimalist choreography later in life. At age nine she entered the state ballet school in Saint Petersburg, graduating in 1908 as an “Artist of the Imperial Theatres.”. The following year she became a member of the Ballets Russes, dancing alongside Vaslav under the supervision of director Serge Diaghilev.

As a dancer, Nijinska was known to be expressive and powerful, creating iconic roles including Papillon in Carnaval by Mikail Fokine. She was a strong technician and rejected the narrow, traditional ideal of the female dancer as it was at the time, once emphatically telling Diaghilev, “I am not a ballerina.” She sometimes played male and androgynous roles, displaying an audacity described by contemporary male critics as brazen and grotesque.

During the tumultuous years of the First World War and Russian Civil War, Bronislava left the Ballets Russes and Russia, living for a time in Ukraine dancing for the Kyiv City Theatre. It was here that she began her long career as a teacher and choreographer, developing her own artistic principles.

At this time in ballet, the focus was on achieving a perfect position that could be held and admired. For Bronislava and other avant-garde choreographers of her generation, the motion itself, the spaces between positions, was the most important. She had an innate sense of rhythm, and through experimentation with futuristic stage performances, began to develop a practice of abstraction, focusing on ornamentalism, light and music, separate from narrative. George Balanchine would popularise the concept of abstract ballet in the 1940s, but Bronislava was already expressing these ideas on stage some twenty years earlier. In 1919 she founded The School of Movement in Kyiv, a groundbreaking and progressive dance institution. The school’s curriculum and theory (documented in a 1920 treatise she wrote called “On Movement”) combined academic theory with innovation, allowing its students to tackle both traditional and modern repertoire.

The afterparty for Les Noces reads like a scene from A Midnight in Paris. Hosted by American artists Gerald and Sara Murphy (the noted party animals served as inspiration for the Driver’s in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night), the party was held in a large barge floating on the Seine. Sara, unable to buy flowers on a Sunday, decorated with flea market toys, fire trucks, dolls and clowns, which Pablo Picasso rearranged into absurdist tableaus. Pianist Marcelle Meyer entertained ballerinas by playing Scarlatti, while painter Natalia Goncharova read palms and poet Jean Cocteau ran around the deck with a lantern screaming, “We’re sinking!” As dawn broke and the buckets of champagne began to dwindle, Diaghilev’s secretary Boris Kochno and conductor Ernest Ansermet took down a decorative laurel wreath and a very drunk Stravinsky jumped through it like a hoop. The infamous party only added to the wild, unconventional reputation of Les Noces.

Throughout her fifty-year career, Bronislava Nijinska created at least sixty works for two dozen companies, yet sadly, only three of her works survive in full. While her works may have fallen out of company repertory or been lost to history, her legacy lived on through her students, including Alicia Markova, Monica Mason, Rosella Hightower, David Lichine, and Ninette de Valois.

In 1964, Bronislava was invited to restage Les Biches for The Royal Ballet by Frederick Ashton. The two had met in 1928, with Bronislava mentoring Ashton for the next forty years. Now in her seventies, she still possessed seemingly inexhaustible energy, demonstrating every moment and movement in rehearsals. Two years later, she was invited back to The Royal Ballet to restage Les Noces, cementing her reputation “as one of the formative choreographers of the 20th century,” as noted by dance critic Horst Koegler.

In her final years, Bronislava devoted herself to writing memoirs about her early life. These writings were dedicated to and largely centred on her beloved brother, whose struggle with mental illness and tragic death shadowed much of her life. Published posthumously by her daughter, Irina, these memoirs only scratch the surface of Bronislava’s brilliant career and lifetime of achievements.