Dance performances happen in the present time and then fade away. Musical scores have been written and published for centuries, as have the texts of dramas, but dance has been an elusive art. Before the development of modern photography, there was no way to preserve what dance performances looked like. And some of the people who have contributed most to the art of dance have been almost forgotten, including the younger sister of the great Vaslav Nijinski, Bronislava Nijinska.

Bronislava Nijinska was born in Minsk, Belarus, on January 8, 1891. Raising a family while traveling to so many different locations was difficult and eventually Nijinska’s father left the family. Her mother struggled to raise Nijinska and her brothers, but the children gew up spending much of their time on their own.

Eventually each of the children entered the Imperial Theatrical School in Moscow, where they excelled in dancing. Vaslav Nijinsky, quickly became a star and was recognized as a genius when he first started performing. His younger sister was also an excellent performer, but she is remembered more for her work as a choreographer than as a dancer.

Nijinska probably would have followed the pattern that her parents had set, becoming an itinerant dancer in Russia after she graduated from school, but the world changed dramatically after the Russian Revolution and World War I. Nijinska spent much of her life moving from one city to another not only in Europe, but later in South America and the United States. During her long life, Europe was transformed and the world suffered through two world wars, but her allegiance was to her art and not to an individual country.

At first, after graduation from school, Nijinska joined Diaghilev’s ballet troupe which became the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. During the 1920s, many Russians fled the Soviet Union and moved to Western Europe. Vaslav Nijinsky and Diaghilev were leading figures in the group, but Nijinsky became ill and was hospitalized with schizophrenia in 1929, the same year that Diaghilev died. This happened during the period that Western Europeans were becoming aware of the power of ballet and interest in the art was spreading especially to Paris and London. 

Nijinska struggled for the rest of her life to set up a dance troupe that would continue the work these men had pioneered. Her devotion to the art of dance was legendary, but her fame never reached that of her brother or the men who controlled the major dance groups of the period. Nonetheless she was able to articulate some of the major beliefs of modern ballet. “Movement is the principal element in dance” she wrote, explaining why she emphasized the way dancers used their bodies rather than the achievement of graceful tableaus.  

Nijinska has never achieved the fame she deserves, but her latest biography will enable readers to discover why she accomplished so much. Lynn Garafola’s. La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern. (Oxford 2022) gives a rich, full picture of the life and work of Bronislava Nijinska. It is available now in many libraries and bookstores