Description
La Nijinska is the first biography of twentieth-century ballet's premier female choreographer.Overshadowed in life and legend by her brother Vaslav Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska had a far longer and more productive career. An architect of twentieth-century neoclassicism, she experienced the transformative power of the Russian Revolution and created her greatest work - Les Noces - under the influence of its avant-garde. Many of her ballets rested on the probing of gender boundaries, a mistrust of conventional gender roles, and the heightening of the ballerina's technical and artistic prowess. A prominent member of Russia Abroad, she worked with leading figures of twentieth-century art, music, and ballet, including Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Poulenc, Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Frederick Ashton, Alicia Markova, and Maria Tallchief. She was also a remarkable dancer in her own right with a bravura technique and powerful stage presence that enabled her to perform an unusually broad repertory. Finally, she was the author of an acclaimed volume of memoirs in addition to a major treatise on movement. Nijinska's career sheds new light on the modern history of ballet and of modernism more generally, recuperating the memory of lost works and forgotten artists, many of them women. But it also reveals the sexism pervasive in the upper echelons of the early and mid-twentieth-century ballet world, barriers that women choreographers still confront.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsTransliteration and Russian NamesPrefaceChapter 1: Nijinska's ApprenticeshipChapter 2: Amazon of the Avant-GardeChapter 3: Back from the FutureChapter 4: Where is Home?Chapter 5: Les NocesChapter 6: Les BichesChapter 7: Le Train Bleu and its AftermathChapter 8: A Free-lance ChoreographerChapter 9: Globalizing ModernismChapter 10: Les Ballets de Madame Ida RubinsteinChapter 11: A Choreographer for Russia AbroadChapter 12: Les Ballets Russes de Bronislava NijinskaChapter 13: On the RoadChapter 14: In Wartime AmericaChapter 15: The Final ActChapter 16: ResurrectionList of WorksIllustrations CreditsArchives, Collections, and Other SourcesNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
