“La Nijinska: Revealing and Constructing Legacy”

Abstract

“I don’t want the conventions of ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ to exist for the female dancer. Every movement, if it’s new, is a find” (Nijinska, in Garafola, p. 54). Taken from Bronislava Nijinska’s 1918 treatise, this quote epitomizes her outlook, on ballet and life. Over the years, scholars have given us rich snippets of Nijinska’s career, but the entirety of her work has not been fully analyzed. Lynn Garafola’s La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern does more than fill this gap; it provides an incredibly thorough account of Nijinska’s artistic interventions from the time she trained with the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg to her developing the School of Movement in Kiev to creating more than sixty original works with nearly twenty different companies. Detailed and dense, La Nijinska functions as a reference for ballet historians, and sparks larger discussions around the influence and role of dance critics, what it means to be a single working mother in the performing arts, and the power structures that shape legacies. Nijinska’s biological family had much to do with her own legacy as an artist. Her older brother Vaslav Nijinsky inspired her approaches to dance and opened professional doors for her, but Garafola does not allow Nijinsky’s success to overshadow Nijinska’s accomplishments. The text refreshingly spends little time on their relationship; the stories that do arise paint a complicated sibling dynamic. Nijinska followed Nijinsky as he resigned from the Imperial Theater and started working with the Ballets Russes. There he choreographed on her, including major roles such as the Chosen Maiden from The Rite of Spring (1913). However, after she married Alexander Kochetovsky and became pregnant with her daughter Irina, Nijinsky became enraged and pulled her out of the piece. Garafola notes that “taking her out of ballets to which she had contributed so much was yet another instance of the cruelty that appears time and again in Nijinsky’s behavior toward his sister . . . he seemed to be punishing her female body . . . chastising her . . . for wanting a love life of her own, for