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In 1932, after Colonel Wassily de Basil turns the Opéra Russe ballet ensemble over to Nijinska’s former adversary, Boris Kochno, and the choreographer George Balanchine, Nijinska decides to form her own Ballets Russes company, which debuts at the Opéra-Comique in Paris with a Russian opera troupe led by Chaliapin. Nijinska, on her own after so many years, creates several new ballets, including Variations (to Beethoven), Les Comédiens Jaloux (to Casella), and a semi-abstract Hamlet to Liszt’s tone poem in which she plays the Danish prince. To support the company she returns to Buenos Aires for another extended engagement, then, with her own company, heads to Monte Carlo to fulfill de Basil’s contract there. In Paris her season is hamstrung by defections; when it is over, her scenery and costumes are impounded to pay her Russian impresario’s debts. Her company collapses, a victim of the era’s economic precarity, mounting French nationalism, and anti-Russian quotas in the performing arts. Once again she is left with thousands of francs in unpaid bills.

In 1934, Nijinska travels to Hollywood to choreograph the ballets in Max Reinhardt’s legendary film A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The following year, in London, she choreographs Les Cent Baisers (The Hundred Kisses) for the de Basil company, a success that reintroduces her to the city’s ballet community. Tragedy strikes on the return to Paris, when her son is killed and her daughter seriously injured in a car accident that leaves Nijinska and her husband, who was driving, unharmed. Returning to professional life, she stages Les Noces to acclaim in New York, although de Basil, bowing to pressure from Massine, pulls it from the London season, a bitter disappointment for her. After a brief engagement with the Markova-Dolin Ballet, she becomes artistic director of the Polish Ballet, a government-sponsored organization for which she creates several Polish-themed works, including Legend of Cracow and Chopin Concerto, the first of many plotless or semi-plotless ballets to Romantic music, but is replaced by Leon Woizikovsky. When World War II breaks out in Europe in 1939, Nijinska sails with her family to New York.

In 1964, Frederick Ashton, now artistic director of Britain’s Royal Ballet, invites Nijinska to stage Les Biches, followed two years later by an invitation to set Les Noces, revivals that re-establish her reputation as a major modernist artist. A flurry of revivals follows. At the same time, Nijinska meets the Bolshoi ballerina Galina Ulanova and tries to interest the Bolshoi’s artistic director Yury Grigorovich in staging Les Noces in Moscow. She corresponds with Soviet dance scholars, including Vera Krasovskaya, and reconnects with several of her former Kiev students, now artists living in Moscow. She begins rehearsals of Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune with the Kirov Ballet, but Natalia Makarova’s defection and the end of the “Thaw” dooms the project. A heavy smoker, Nijinska develops heart and other problems that cause her to be hospitalized, and not long afterward her husband passes away. With her daughter Irina’s assistance, she remains active, staging several ballets for Kathleen Crofton’s Central Ballet of Buffalo and working on her book, now titled “My Brother Vatza,” which she never finishes. Nijinska dies at home in Pacific Palisades in 1972.

Nijinska and her husband spend the 1914–1915 theatrical season in St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd after Russia enters the war), where they are engaged by Narodny Dom. The following year they settle in Kiev, where they are hired to stage opera dances at the City Theater but soon begin producing evenings of ballet. In 1917 Nijinska tries to join her brother in Western Europe but because of the Russian Revolution is unable to secure travel papers. With Kochetovsky, she spends several months in Moscow, where she meets the avant-garde painter Alexandra Exter and drafts the first iteration of her treatise on movement. The family returns to Kiev where Nijinska opens the School of Movement in February 1919, only weeks after the birth of her son, Lev, and the Bolshevik invasion of the city. In the next two years Nijinska transforms her students into a performing group allied with the city’s left-wing arts community. Galvanized by her vision of a new dance, they applaud her first modernist solos and dance in her first plotless group works. Nijinska also collaborates with the avant-garde stage directors Les Kurbas and Marko Tereshchenko and with the artist Vadim Meller, whose paintings leave vivid impressions of her dancing. In 1921, with her mother and two children, Nijinska flees Ukraine and joins thousands of Russians in emigration.

Settling in Hollywood where she opens a school, Nijinska presents a program of works at the Hollywood Bowl in the hope—never realized—of establishing a professional ballet company in Southern California. She travels frequently to New York to choreograph ballets for (American) Ballet Theatre, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and Ballet International, although the high cost of coast-to-coast travel causes her to lose many jobs. An inspired teacher (her students included Cyd Charisse, Maria Tallchief, and Allegra Kent) and much-admired choreographer, she restages a number of her older ballets, including Etude and Chopin Concerto, and choreographs new ones such as La Fille Mal Gardée, Snow Maiden, and Pictures at an Exhibition. However, she fails to form a long-term relationship with any of these companies, encountering competition not only from American choreographers but also Russian ones like Michel Fokine and George Balanchine, who have worked in the United States for many years. Homesick for Europe and speaking little English, she nevertheless takes out papers to become a US citizen. In the early 1940s she completes a short volume of reminiscence, “Diary of a Young Dancer,” which remains unpublished.

In 1947 the Marquis de Cuevas invites Nijinska to teach and choreograph for his new company based first in Monte Carlo and later in Paris. Anxious to reconnect with friends and to recover her scenery and costumes seized during World War II by the Germans, she accepts with alacrity. For the Marquis’ Grand Ballet she restages many of her own works, including two original ones, along with Diaghilev-era classics such as Petrouchka. She forms a close bond with the American ballerina Rosella Hightower and the Russo-French virtuoso Serge Golovine. She becomes friendly with the dance writer Françoise Reiss, a friendship that encourages her to return to her own memoir, which now focuses on her brother. In 1960 she removes her name from a splendid new production of The Sleeping Beauty when she sees the extravagant, outré designs by the Marquis’ nephew, Raymundo Larraín. Nearing seventy she returns to California, her career in ruins, her property lost, and her memoir still unfinished.

After completing her training in 1908, Nijinska becomes a member of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet, where she dances in works by Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, and others. The following year she takes part in the inaugural season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris, rising in the next four years from a member of the corps to a valued company soloist and performing a wide range of classical and character roles in Michel Fokine’s new ballets. She has a complicated relationship with her brother Vaslav Nijinsky. When he resigns from the Imperial Ballet to work full-time for the Ballets Russes, she follows. She plays a key role in the genesis of his first ballet, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, which awakens her desire to choreograph, and was the original Chosen Maiden in his Rite of Spring, a modernist landmark. Her failed romance with the singer Fedor Chaliapin, linked to the budding awareness of herself as a creative artist, becomes a theme of her diaries for the next twenty-five years. In 1912 she marries the dancer Alexander Kochetovsky and the following year gives birth to her daughter, Irina. Her pregnancy infuriates her brother, and he drops her from the cast of The Rite of Spring. When Nijinsky is dismissed from the Ballets Russes after his marriage, she resigns from the company and becomes both the ballerina and ballet mistress of his Saison Nijinsky in London. In 1914 she returns to Russia where she spends World War I and the Revolution.

During the next several years, as the effects of the Great Depression deepen, Nijinska takes whatever freelance jobs offer themselves. She works at the Paris Opé ra, for director Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and the Vienna State Opera, where she walks out after only six weeks. But most of her jobs are for “Russia Abroad,” especially the Opéra Russe à Paris, which sponsors evenings of her ballets (including a revival of Petrouchka and the definitive version of her Bach ballet Etude) and which she views, mistakenly, as the nucleus of a new company under her direction. After nineteen years of adoring him from afar, she finds herself in physical proximity with the Russian singing star Fedor Chaliapin. Her obsessive love for him, which she links to her creativity as an artist, becomes the dominant theme of her diaries. In 1930 she publishes her treatise “Movement and the School of Movement” in the Austrian dance journal Schrifttanz.

Embarking on a free-lance career, Nijinska opens a studio in London with the goal of forming a professional company, while unsuccessfully seeking backers to fund it. When Jacques Rouché offers her work at the Paris Opéra, she closes the studio and moves her family from Monte Carlo to Paris. Here she plans the repertory for Theatre Choréographique, a chamber company for which she creates a half-dozen works, all designed by Alexandra Exter. Among them is Holy Etudes, a Bach ballet she began sketching in Kiev and which she revives during the next two decades. Financed by loans that she is unable to repay and undermined by Diaghilev, Theatre Choréographique folds after a short tour of English seaside resorts. Returning to Paris, Nijinska choreographs several works for the Opéra, including Les Impressions de Music-Hall, and at Rouché’s request develops a plan for the modernization of the Opéra’s ballet company that is rejected by the dancers. Briefly engaged by Diaghilev, she rehearses Les Noces for its London premiere and choreographs Romeo and Juliet, her last work for the Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev’s interventions nearly destroy.

Back in Paris, in 1928 Nijinska becomes the choreographer of a new ballet company organized by Ida Rubinstein, an actress, sometime dancer, celebrity, and French music patron of note, who at forty-five dreams of being a classical ballerina. For the immensely wealthy Rubinstein, Nijinska assembles a company of fifty dancers, mostly Russian émigrés trained in Paris but with a sprinkling of dancers from England (including the young choreographer Frederick Ashton), the United States, and elsewhere. The company gives two seasons at the Paris Opéra, in addition to performances at La Scala, the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels, and the Vienna Staatsoper. Despite Rubinstein’s insistence on starring in every work, Nijinska creates several important ballets, including Bolero, Le Baiser de la Fée, La Bien-Aimée, and La Valse, although Nijinska’s first realization of the Ravel score is excoriated by the Paris critics. Unlike the Ballets Russes, the Rubinstein company is female centered and exudes a new romanticism that looks forward to the 1930s. For a private soiree in 1929 she choreographs a second ballet to Poulenc’s music—Aubade.

In 1922, as Diaghilev seeks to counter the failure of The Sleeping Princess by steering the Ballets Russes in a new direction, Nijinka becomes his resident choreographer. In Paris, where the company plays back-to-back seasons at the Paris Opéra and Théâtre Mogador, she creates several new ballets, including Le Renard to music by Stravinsky, and Aurora’s Wedding, a distillation of dances from The Sleeping Princess. She reclaims her old Fokine roles and adds several ballets choreographed by Léonide Massine to her repertory, including his version of The Rite of Spring, in which she is cast as the Chosen Maiden. Finally, she dances a number of male roles, including her brother’s in L’Après-midi d’un Faune. Although praised for infusing new life into the Ballets Russes, she dreams of returning to Kiev and continuing her choreographic experiments, but is urged by friends there to stay in the West. After plans to re-establish the School of Movement in Vienna fall through, she arranges for a handful of her male students to leave Kiev and join the Ballets Russes.

In addition to fulfilling other engagements, Nijinska spends most of 1926 and 1927 as ballet director at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Here she stages several of her Ballets Russes and Paris Opéra productions in addition to creating new ballets, including the Colón’s first dance work by an Argentine composer, Cuadro campestre. Les Noces, which premieres only four months after its first performance in London, is a triumph. As a teacher, she has a lasting impact on the rapidly professionalizing corps of young dancers, which includes several of the company’s future ballerinas, while as a choreographer, she aligns the repertory with the latest trends of European ballet modernism. The Colón’s generous salary allows her to pay off most of her debts, while supporting her mother and children in Paris, and paying her own living expenses and those of her husband in Buenos Aires. As her second nine-month engagement comes to an end, she vows to find work in Europe to remain close to her family.

In Vienna, Nijinska finds her brother catatonic at the Steinhof Sanatorium, a mental hospital; he does not recognize her. When her relationship with Romola Nijinsky breaks down, Nijinska is left penniless and takes a job dancing in a cabaret to support her family. After nearly four months in Vienna, she rejoins Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, both as a dancer and a choreographer, her first assignment being updating The Sleeping Beauty (renamed The Sleeping Princess by Diaghilev) to make it appealing to a postwar Western audience. The work is hailed by many because of its superb display of classical dance talent, but also because of the ballet’s associations with monarchy, the St. Petersburg myth, and the French Grand Siècle. Nijinska is dismayed by the anti-Soviet feeling she encounters in the company, disappointed at Diaghilev’s artistically conservative turn, and frustrated at his unwillingness to present her new choreography. After a brief rapprochement, she and Kochetovsky agree to divorce.

In 1925 Nijinska choreographs another stylish work, this one to music by Darius Milhaud. With a libretto by Jean Cocteau and costumes by Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel, Le Train Bleu is inspired by the vogue for beach sports and by celebrities like the tennis star Suzanne Lenglen, Nijinska’s role for herself. Although the ballet is warmly received, the collaboration is fraught with dissension, as Cocteau, supported by Boris Kochno, seeks to impose his ideas of gesture and pantomimic action on the choreography at the expense of the dance material. Nijinska remains critical of Diaghilev’s French turn, angry at his refusal to produce any of her own works (possibly including a collaboration with Alexandra Exter, now in the West). Livid at his attempt to supplant her with her former Kiev student Serge Lifar, she leaves the Ballets Russes in 1925. At her side is her second husband, Nicholas Singaevsky, who becomes her manager and assistant.

Despite the enormous success of the 1923 season, Diaghilev reorients the Ballets Russes toward the aesthetics of Jean Cocteau and the French composers known as “Les Six.” In Monte Carlo he organizes a season of “Ballets Classiques,” with an abbreviated version of Swan Lake as a highlight, and a month-long “Festival Français,” which offers a cycle of French operas and ballets invoking the Grand Siècle but viewed through a modern sensibility. With Belloni off the scene, Nijinska is responsible for choreographing all the new ballets, refreshing old ones, and creating dances for all the operas. She choreographs a second master work, Les Biches, to the music of Francis Poulenc, that reveals her continued fascination with gender ambiguity, her lack of interest in narrative, and her effort to forge a contemporary ballet language. In addition to teaching company class, she works privately with Anton Dolin, whom Diaghilev is grooming as a company star.

In 1922 Diaghilev reaches an agreement with the Société des Bains de Mer for the Ballets Russes to become Monte Carlo’s resident ballet company, although initially this is complicated by the presence of a Franco-Italian troupe directed by Georges Belloni. In Paris, Diaghilev sees Alexander Tairov’s Kamerny Theater, his first glimpse of Soviet avant-garde stagecraft, which is received ecstatically by critics. In response he decides to produce Stravinsky’s Les Noces in the spare, Constructivist style advocated by Nijinska. The ballet is a triumph both for Nijinska and for the company’s dancers, who work relentlessly to master the challenging choreography and score. Hailed by French critics as a masterpiece, Les Noces is condemned by André Levinson, the politically conservative émigré dance critic, who attacks Nijinska personally and condemns the ballet’s Constructivist aesthetic as “Soviet,” the start of a vendetta that lasts for nearly a decade.

This chapter reflects upon the commentary of two literary observers who were also in different ways practitioners of French ballet of the 1920s and 1930s—Jean Cocteau and Paul Valéry—and, of one anthropologist—André Varagnac—who developed the notion of folklore, and folkloric dance in particular as a form of popular innovation or, in other terms, an emergent rather than residual form. With all three, the notion of the popular in dance stood in implicit opposition to the academicism of Russian émigré critics in Paris—notably André Levinson and André Schaïkevitch—who advanced the idea of neoclassicism as the dominant form of dance in modernity. While the Russo-French neoclassicists emphasized the importance ballet’s exploration of its founding technical principles these French commentators had recourse instead to the historical notion of parade or sideshow. This chapter uncovers the dual face of neoclassicism, one formalist and idealist, the other populist. Both Cocteau and Valéry have significant connections with the popular, which I propose to elucidate through the notion of parade or sideshow.

This chapter looks at a variety of phenomena including folkloric dance that contained old regime materials, the ballet itself, and the scholarly research and collecting devoted to the grand siècle at the turn of the century. Three distinct seventeenth centuries were under construction in the historical imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century dance. Research conducted in the early 1970s shows that elements of la belle danse found their way into regional folkloric performance; the seventeenth century became a predominant subject of ballets; musicology—a nascent discipline in France—turned to the discovery and reading of texts of musical theater that were no longer performed. These three activities engendered three versions of the seventeenth century in dance that I refer to as survival, revival, and archival. Survival corresponds to the emergence of ethnography thanks to Van Gennep and later Guilcher; revival refers to the principles of ballet evidenced in the writings of Volynsky on the basis of which new work could be created; archival refers to the discovery of the past as other in the research of Henry Prunières. These led in turn to concepts of performance as artifact, myth, and document, which together constituted the dispersed field of neoclassicism as I understand it in this book. Each of these versions of the seventeenth century came with a political potential with respect to questions of national identity.

Ballet Theatre looks to expand but experiences financial woes, Alicia Alonso develops retinal problems and must return to Cuba, Fernando accompanies her and begins work at Pro-Arte, bringing dancers from Ballet Theatre and Ballet Russe to dance with Cuban-trained dancers