Bronislava nijinska biography of michael

Women’s History Month in Dance 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48. Few figures in dance history better deserve to be rescued from relative obscurity than the often forgotten Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972).

So  it was good news, last weekend, to hear the super-intelligent dance historian Lynn Garafola say, on line, that she had completed the Nijinska biography on which she has been working for many years. 

Nijinska - who began choreographing in Russia during the First World War, and then came west in 1921, just when Diaghilev needed a new choreographer - was one of the most powerfully original of all teachers and choreographers.

Before the First World War, she had created roles for both Mikhail Fokine (a Street Dancer in “Petrushka”) and her brother Vaslav Nijinsky; her “Early Memoirs” about those years may be the most intelligently vivid of all ballet autobiographies.

In her own chore