Acknowledgments
Transliteration and Russian Names
Preface
Chapter 1: Nijinska's Apprenticeship
Chapter 2: Amazon of the Avant-Garde
Chapter 3: Back from the Future
Chapter 4: Where is Home?
Chapter 5: Les Noces
Chapter 6: Les Biches
Chapter 7: Le Train Bleu and its Aftermath
Chapter 8: A Free-lance Choreographer
Chapter 9: Globalizing Modernism
Chapter 10: Les Ballets de Madame Ida Rubinstein
Chapter 11: A Choreographer for Russia Abroad
Chapter 12: Les Ballets Russes de Bronislava Nijinska
Chapter 13: On the Road
Chapter 14: In Wartime America
Chapter 15: The Final Act
Chapter 16: Resurrection
List of Works
Illustrations Credits
Archives, Collections, and Other Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Lynn Garafola is Professor Emerita of Dance at Barnard College,
Columbia University. A dance historian and critic, she is the
author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of
Twentieth-Century Dance, and the editor of several books, including
The Diaries of Marius Petipa, André Levinson on Dance (with Joan
Acocella), José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, and The Ballets
Russes
and Its World. She has curated several exhibitions, including Dance
for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, New York
Story: Jerome Robbins and His World, Diaghilev's Theater of
Marvels: The Ballets Russes and Its Aftermath, and, most recently,
Arthur Mitchell: Harlem's
Ballet Trailblazer.
La Nijinska reveals why some choreographers become canonized and
illustrates the process's inseparability from external funding,
gender, race, class, and ethnicity.
*MARA MANDRADJIEFF, DANCE CHRONICLE*
Esteemed dance historian Lynn Garafola meticulously chronicles this
life -- in the first full Nijinska biography ever
*Mindy Aloff, Wendy Perron*
La Nijinska realigns dance history and does long-overdue justice to
one of the twentieth century's great women artists.
*Alastair Macauley, The New York Review of Books*
In a year of great books about dance, this biography of Vaslav
Nijinskys sister, Bronislava, stands out... Sensational and
enraging.
*Sarah Crompton and Robbie Millen, 7 best film and theatre books of
2022, Sunday Times*
Blessedly free of academic dance jargon... Garafola's writing style
is clear, unfussy, and easy to digest. She presents us, however,
with the life of an immensely talented choreographer whose artistic
ambition remained thwarted and unfulfilled. It's a sad story but
one I urge you to discover for yourself.
*Jonathan Gray*
... an engrossing book, which gives full weight to an extraordinary
life... It is the art that is the ultimate subject of Garafolas
book, and she does a triumphant job of reasserting its importance
and recreating its impact. So few of Nijinskas works survive that
is good to be reminded of just how significant many were when they
were first seen, and how wide her influence was on succeeding
generations...
*Sarah Crompton, The Spectator*
Lynn Garafola, doyenne of ballet historians, has produced a
scrupulously researched biography of a remarkable woman...
Garafola's biography of this brave and complex woman is as
judicious as it is sensitive. I recently completed a modest book
covering some of the same field. I only wish I had been able to
incorporate her meticulous scholarship before it went to press.
*Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review*
... serious and thoroughly researched study of ballet's leading
female choreographer... [an] excellent and thoughtful book.
*Gillian Spickernell, The Lady*
fascinating, and very well researched
*Avatâra Ayuso, ONE*
It's gratifying when a biographer and her subject are as perfectly
matches as these two are. Everything in Lynn Garafola's prior life
- her authorship of a major work on Serge Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes, her investigations into other ballet and modern dance
companies, her years of teaching in Barnard's eminent dance
department - prepared her to accomplish this challenging task. And
for Bronislava Nijinska, the long-neglected sister of Vaslav
Nijinsky, it's nothing short of a resuscitation. Left out of the
ballet history in which she actively participated ... she now has
been brought to life by this first-ever biography.
*Wendy Lesser, New York Times*
Finally the biography she deserves.
*Dance International*
Nijinska could not have hoped for a more sympathetic and
conscientious biographer than Garafola.... She understands the
physical, educational, visual, dramatic, political, interpersonal,
and financial aspects of the dance industry from the inside
out.
*Harlow Robinson, Los Angeles Review of Books*
[Nijinska's] life after 1924 is known only in sketchy form, though
Garafola does a tremendous job of resurrecting it.
*Marcia Siegel, Hudson Review*
A biography ... told in rich, fascinating detail.
*Jennifer Wilson, The Nation*
Garafola documents the ways in which a misogynistic establishment
undermined Nijinska's achievements and argues that, despite this,
her ideas about the relationship between movement and music helped
shape the modern art of ballet.
*The New Yorker*
La Nijinska is a wonderful read; a window into the life of a woman
who, for decades, was the world's leading female choreographer....
A big but gratifying read. Garafola provides a previously sketchy,
monochrome account of history in color for the first time.
*Seeing Dance*
A fascinating account of life and work of the great and enigmatic
Bronislava Nijinska, who left us a couple of ballets of genius and
many unanswered questions. Nijinska, the most influential woman
choreographer in classical ballet, was an inspiration for many
generations of dance makers, and yet many aspects of her life
remained poorly researched and unknown, partly because her memoirs
only covered the early years. I was especially interested to read
about Nijinska's choreographic debuts in Kiyv, Ukraine, and the
second part of her life in California. The interviews of the
dancers who worked with her last are priceless. Congratulations to
Lynn Garafola. This book, thoroughly researched, full of unknown
facts and inspiring details, is a book we were all waiting for.
*Alexei Ratmansky, Choreographer, American Ballet Theatre*
In this inspirational first biography of Bronislava Nijinska, based
on global research, Lynn Garafola has successfully drawn the great
choreographer from the shadow of her famous brother. She reveals a
complex woman who experienced more than her fair share of tragedies
and was constantly betrayed by men, while creating experimental
ballets and inspiring successive generations of performers,
directors and choreographers.
*Jane Pritchard, Curator of Dance, Victoria and Albert Museum,
London*
This book is an astonishing achievement. Nijinska, sister of tragic
dancer-genius Nijinsky, emerges here as a larger-than-life heroine,
an Amazon endowed with visionary talent, yet blocked at every turn
by forces arrayed against an ambitious woman. It's an epic tale,
based on impeccable sources, narrated with rare lucidity, set
against a three-continent-wide panorama of European, American and
émigré-Russian artists and impresarios, all chasing after this
magical quality we now call Modernity.
*Elizabeth Kendall, author of Balanchine and the Lost Muse:
Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer*
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