Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi, dance friends. I’m Margaret Fuhrer, editor and producer of The Dance Edit newsletter and podcast. Welcome to the 14th episode of The Dance Edit Extra!
This time we have the wonderful dance historian Lynn Garafola, who knows seemingly everything there is to know about ballet history. Lynn has just published the first biography of the great choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, titled La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern. Nijinska was one of the architects of neoclassicism, she was an absolutely vital part of ballet’s twentieth-century avant-garde. And yet, despite her prolific output and her innovative ways of thinking about technique and gender, Nijinska is mostly known as the sister of the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. She is so often overlooked in historical accounts; she was also often underestimated or written off during her own lifetime, a sign of the sexism so pervasive in ballet. And only a few of her works survive today, most notably Les Noces.
In Lynn’s biography, Nijinska finally gets her due. And Nijinska’s story is a reminder that the challenges female choreographers continue to face in ballet have very deep roots. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Lynn, which full of color and detail about Nijinska’s remarkable life.
[pause]
Margaret Fuhrer:
I now have the pleasure of welcoming renowned dance historian and educator Lynn Garafola, to the podcast. Hi, Lynn. Thank you so much for joining today.
Lynn Garafola:
Hi, Margaret. I’m delighted to be here. I worked for many years for Dance Magazine, so it’s a part of my life.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I’ve been waiting for a while now to be able to pick your brain on this podcast, because you are our go-to person for any dance history question. You know all. It’s so wonderful. But there is a specific reason for this interview today, which is your new biography of the great choreographer, Bronislava Nijinska, which just came out. Congratulations.
Lynn Garafola:
Thank you.
Margaret Fuhrer:
So the scope of Nijinska’s achievements is huge, but for a long time, her contributions to ballet have been under-recognized, under-acknowledged. Case in point, this is the first Nijinska biography, which is almost unbelievable.
Lynn Garafola:
Yes.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I’m going to start with a very big question. Can you talk about why she hasn’t always been given her due, maybe beginning with her very famous brother?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, I think that was part of the problem, that so much energy and so much attention and so much writing was focused on him—and particularly on Afternoon of a Faun, a work that he had developed on her own body, and The Rite of Spring—that in a sense there didn’t seem to be much room for anything else. Also, no one seemed to be particularly interested in her, I think, in part because he was such a dazzling figure, and I think there were many male writers who really identified with him. How many people would say, “Oh, I fell in love with ballet”—this is back in the 1930s or 1940s, young men, really teenage boys—”hen I read Romola Nijinska’s biography of Vaslav, and I decided I want to be a dancer too.” Now that’s a biography that she’s all but written out of, Bronislava is all but written out of. So you have these two very close siblings, and then you have a tremendous divergence in the course of their lives and how they’ve been treated over the years by the press.
Nijinsky, we know, danced until 1917, 1918. After that, he suffered a whole series of emotional breakdowns and basically lived the rest of his life as an invalid until he died in 1950. He had electric shock treatments when they were very first introduced, and all of this created a tremendous mythology about him that she in no way could really cope with. She, on the other hand, had a much harder life than he did. She had children. She had a mother to take care of. Her husband, well, her first husband, she threw out. Her second husband was very devoted to her, but perhaps not the best in terms of advancing her career. But there were times when she was going out and making all the money to support the kids and support the mother and to support the help that would enable her to go off for nine months at a time to Buenos Aires and stage ballets. You can say she always put her career first and that there was a deep well of guilt about that, but she really always put it first.
Margaret Fuhrer:
So to the limited extent that Nijinska has been represented in historical accounts so far, what was the previous sort of consensus on her and her work?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, after 1960, I would say it went down to two works, Les Noces and Les Biches. These were two works that were choreographed in the 1920s for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and the reason that they were very significant works—and Nijinska herself had tried to keep them alive in various companies that she worked for, but she basically couldn’t at a certain point. And so when Frederick Ashton—who had danced in the Ida Rubinstein company in the late ’20s, for which Nijinska was the choreographer—invited her to the Royal Ballet in the mid 1960s to stage those ballets, that really began a kind of, I would say, renaissance for her or a resurrection of her, because the works were staged in London by some critics who had actually seen productions of them in the 1920s, and it was a very knowledgeable audience, both critically as well as population.
The other thing is that Ashton had both of the works notated, and they were also some kind of film, so that they could be brought back, in other words. And this was really important, because she died a few years later. And so these became the texts, these notations, upon which later productions essentially were based. Even if in fact they didn’t use the texts, the score, every time it was revived, the person who was reviving it, if you traced it back, it went back to one of his scores. And so if that’s not an argument in favor of notation, I don’t know what is, to enable it to stay on.
But she choreographed nearly 80 ballets, opera ballets, et cetera, and those two are really the only ones we have. There’s around a little bit of Aurora’s Wedding. I had hoped that it would be possible to bring back Chopin Concerto, a work from the 1930s that she originally did for the Polish Ballet, but unfortunately, certain things happened. It was the moment when those could have been revived, when there were people who were young enough to remember the ballets and were able to stage and talk about them and understood what they were about, that moment has unfortunately passed. It’s tragic.
Margaret Fuhrer:
It is tragic, because she was so prolific. I had not realized until reading your book the critical role that Ashton played in the preservation of her work.
Lynn Garafola:
Ashton played a huge role. He loved her, he loved her, and she was so deeply grateful. You to read some of these letters to “My dear Freddy,” or “My son, Freddy.” And the other one whom she was enormously grateful to was Anton Dolin, who she used to always write. They used to write in various languages, sort of all mixed up together, and he wrote to her practically to the end of her days.
Margaret Fuhrer:
She made the solo—in Le Train Bleu, Anton Dolin was the original star of that work. Is that correct?
Lynn Garafola:
Yes. He was the original acrobat.
Margaret Fuhrer:
So is it just his solo that survives of that work, or do we have more of that work still?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, there is some kind of recreation, which the Paris Opera does. It was originally restaged on the Oakland Ballet by Frank Ries, who had worked a little bit with Dolin, had some notes from Dolin, and basically put it together, although Irina Nijinska was not terribly happy with what it was and coached in a slightly different way some of the pas de deux. So I think it’s a little cutesier, the reconstruction, than Nijinska and the people in the ’20s. They weren’t cute.
Margaret Fuhrer:
They weren’t cutesy.
Lynn Garafola:
She had sense of humor. She could have a sense of humor, but she wasn’t cutesy, nor Diaghilev. He certainly wasn’t cutesy.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, there does seem to be a trend to cutesify some of those works when they are reconstructed.
Lynn Garafola:
Well, I think in that case, Ries adored Hollywood films, and so he was using Hollywood films and some of the gags that you’d see in Hollywood films, and that was what he was doing to bring in some of the period feeling. But this was a very sophisticated group, the Diaghilev company, and even when they were playing with popular things, they were doing it in a very sophisticated way, almost a certain kind of ironic distance to the material. And of course, it was very elegant, because things were by Chanel, the first time that they had had some of those bathing suits, even though they were very hard for the men to partner, because they would slip. It had kind of these cubistic cabanas on the side, and then it opened to this extraordinary blow up of a painting by Picasso. So it was really thrilling, and to read the reviews is to know that it was an enormous success. But no one really says it was too cute or anything like that. That’s where I think it was more Frank Ries’ sensibility there.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I’ve sidetracked myself here out of my own curiosity, so let’s now get back to my list of questions. So you’re, of course, a long-time scholar of the Ballets Russes, you were already essentially a Nijinska expert, but when you decided to write this book, did you feel that this was a story that today’s dance artists and audiences especially needed to hear? How do you think Nijinska’s story speaks to this particular moment in the dance world?
Lynn Garafola:
I think it’s really important at this particular moment, when we keep talking about the role of women in ballet, and the role of women in ballet, especially in choreographic roles, as well as in management roles, to look at her experience. She’s someone who kept plowing ahead. It was not easy. Now that I’ve been doing ,or I’ve done, all the kind of micro-research—because when you do a biography, you do a lot of detailed micro-research, what was she doing on May 28th when something opened two days later? Oh, she was probably going crazy. And to realize—it’s in those details that you really see how she was taken advantage of, how she was not given her due. You can also then see, when you’re reading a broad number of criticisms, of critiques and reviews and reportages, how she’s treated and how badly she’s treated in some ways, how her body is considered fair game for really nasty things, or how she’s passed over and no one tells her.
There are letters from 1943 and 1944 where she’s desperately trying to figure out, where she’s writing to Sergei Denham, who was the director of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, begging him to tell her, “What is my assignment for this year?” She sort of assumed that she would do a new ballet or maybe bring back an older one. And he kept putting her off and putting her off, and of course, he hadn’t finished paying her. And then suddenly, Balanchine’s put in charge of everything.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, geez.
Lynn Garafola:
And again and again, these things—and this was not the first time there was this Balanchine business. So at a certain point, I think, when she felt so much was against her, she just [angry noise]. And she kept wanting to have her own company, but because she trusted so few people, it was so difficult for her to raise money. I think in some respects, she was responding to very much to her brother, whom she saw as being encompassed, surrounded by this very wealthy world of upper-crust ballet cognoscenti, and she wanted no part of that world. But on the other hand, that was a world that had money and would’ve made things easier for her when she had her own company.
She actually did some of her own companies and productions by borrowing money and having then to repay it with interest over time. So when you start seeing all of these Dunning letters, when you start seeing how much she’s sending home, please pay so and so, that was for ballet slippers, please pay so and so, that was for scene painting. It was unending.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I talked to you about 10 years ago for a story I was writing for Pointe magazine about ballet’s lack of female choreographers, that perennial topic of concern these days. And one of the first things you pointed out was that that wasn’t always the case, that ballet has in fact had many women like Nijinska and has also seen many female directors and ballet masters and critics, but most of them were only semi-visible thanks to the forces of sexism and misogyny. Can you talk about who some of these other forgotten figures of ballet history are?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, we don’t think, for instance, in the 19th century, of Fanny Cerrito, who we think of as a ballerina, but she also choreographed. She also took copyright for her ballets. In other words, she had written the libretti, and she filed for copyright. Marie Taglioni did at least one ballet. She was intending to do others. But what’s interesting, I think, in some of the ways we’re beginning to think about choreography, is that it’s not just productions. There have been women who have contributed choreography to productions, but that they are not credited as choreographers.
But to go back to the 19th century, a number of choreographers for a number of popular music halls had female choreographers, both in London as well as in Paris. In Paris, it was Madam Mariquita. There was another one in London, who kept seeing what Mariquita was doing, so she would do some adaptations for the other stage. At the Paris Opera in 1910, there was Madam Stichel. She was actually Italian, but she changed her name.
There were also choreographers, like Carina Ari, whom we never really hear of. We hear of her perhaps as a leading dancer with the Ballet Suédois, but not as a choreographer of her own pieces. And this, I think, is one of the tendencies, is that we hear of things, we hear of women, in particular, if they have been ballerinas or have been principal dancers. We hear of them choreographing, but that’s always secondary to their career.
Another thing is that lots of women have choreographed for school things. So Nijinska herself, when she was at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Fokine choreographed for the graduating, for the students, the advanced students, but there was another, Klyuchevskaya, who choreographed for the graduating students. But Fokine is considered a choreographer, but Klyuchevskaya is considered only a teacher, and these other things were simply done as part of their teaching capacity.
And I think that’s part of the problem, is that we assign women perhaps to teaching roles, we assign them to performance roles, but we don’t necessarily assign them to anything else. Even Nijinska’s own mother choreographed, because she would arrange, stage the dances for operettas in St. Petersburg when she needed money. And then she would also teach the young women who had not been very well trained to dance a little bit better. So as I say, we have to look a little more carefully at women who have taken part in the ballet world in ways other than just dancing.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. It seems like Nijinska’s relationship with Diaghilev actually is sort of an example of that, the rigidness of the roles that women were allowed to have, where he was a great supporter of her as a performer, but initially very hesitant about her as a choreographer. Can you talk about that complex relationship a little?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, it was a very complex relationship, because remember, because Diaghilev was her brother’s lover.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes, also that. [laughter]
Lynn Garafola:
That complicated the relationship in that she first met him, not in a professional capacity, but when he visited her home with her brother and was joking around with her mother, calling her Pan, which was Polish for Madame or something, because her mother was Polish, and charmed them all. So there was that personal side, and that was something Diaghilev could be impossible, he could be in cheek, but he was always very generous with Nijinsky’s mother and very kind to her. So he would bring her to Western Europe, and it would be enough money for her to get some clothes and also to stay in a hotel so she could be with her son and see performances also and be with the daughter, with Bronislava.
So there was that, but then on the other hand, her brother didn’t even want to really recommend her to the company, that Diaghilev accept her. Probably he thought she wasn’t as attractive; Diaghilev insisted on only having attractive young ladies in the corps, and she was not a beautiful person, did not have much physical beauty offstage, if you know what I mean, in a more conventional way. She was very interesting, as Stravinsky once said, with fascinating eyes, but that wasn’t conventional beauty, like, say, Karsavina had, or others.
But he had enormous respect for her, because she worked really hard, and she really changed the way she danced. She was clearly very, very intelligent, and that was obviously something that Diaghilev prized. However, he felt, who needs two choreographers in one family? He was putting all his eggs in her brother’s basket, and there was nothing left for her.
And it was really only when she separated from him during the first World War, when he remained in Western Europe and then was in the United States, and she was in Russia and then Ukraine, that she really began to choreograph. And she did it in a way that was quite interesting. She did it in a way that was almost like a modern dancer, if you will, which I think is so interesting in that she’s trying out all of these things on her own body. Now, that may have been a descendant of what she had done with her brother for Afternoon of a Faun, trying everything out on his body, her body, and then later moving to working with a group and also trying to teach in a way that enabled, initially at least, that inflected the teaching with other kinds of ideas.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about what made Nijinska … She was revolutionary, essentially, as a choreographer. The subtitle of your book is “Choreographer of the Modern,” which, even with just those few words, there’s a lot to talk about. How was Nijinska a pioneer of the modern tradition in ballet?
Lynn Garafola:
First of all, she did not refuse to work in the classical idiom. That, I think, she accepted that. However, she also felt that it couldn’t just be stuck in the 1880s or 1890s. In other words, it had to go beyond petite pas. And she felt after several years with Diaghilev, where she had seen the company change from what it had been in 1909, where they’re doing Les Sylphides, to 1913, where they’re doing The Rite of Spring, which is a pretty tremendous jump, if you will, that the basic class, that is to say what they were doing every morning—and at that point they had classes with Cecchetti himself—did not at all reflect any of the new ideas, any of the physical innovations that had taken place. And so she felt that in her classes, she had to take account of some of those things.
It’s still unclear to me exactly how she intended to do that. I think it’s clearer in Kyiv, when she was writing treatises, where it was clear she wanted classes that almost seemed to have improvisational quality, that was to music or where certain movements that are conventionally done in turnout would be done in parallel positions; the arms were not in classical positions, those would be different; and also the use of épaulement. Although she strongly believed in épaulement, she did not necessarily believe in the classical épaulement. The other place where I think it became clear that she was very different was in the use of space and in the use of ensembles, of groupings. These were very, very different.
Also, I think as she got older and was working with ballerinas, like Alicia Markova and Irina Baranova and Rosella Hightower, that she just went to town. If she felt that they had some kind of real bond and that they trusted her, it almost became like a series of experiments in virtuosity. And the way rhythm would be brought into that so as to enable some of the tremendously virtuosic turns and other things that people said, “Oh, I can’t do it. It’s impossible.” And she’d say, “Well, try it.” I’ve interviewed people who have said, “I could never turn, but when I took class at Nijinska, I could then do two pirouettes.” And I’d say, “Well, what did she do?” And she said, “She’d tap me on my shoulder.”
Margaret Fuhrer:
The magic touch.
Lynn Garafola:
I do think some of it had to do with her emphasis on the center, on balance, that very often the parts of the class—this is now later—would be taken on demi pointe, where things that you normally did, you would do flat, and then you would do it on demi pointe, which strengthened the center and strengthened your balance, so that enabled turns. You knew where you were. You didn’t start flying all over.
But there are all kinds of things where people said, “I went out to work with her for six weeks,” and these weren’t private classes, these were just maybe two classes a day going for an hour-and-a-half, possibly two hours, because sometimes she just went on, and they came back, really strengthened the turns. She needed to work with people whom she felt were giving her something, were willing to take what she had so that it could be a kind of crazy collaboration.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. It’s interesting, because a lot of the kinds of things that you’ve been saying about her as a teacher, as a molder of dancers, it sounds like what people say about Balanchine all the time.
Lynn Garafola:
Yes.
Margaret Fuhrer:
And when we talk about even the development of abstract ballet, that conversation has for so long centered around Balanchine in particular, but Nijinska is an important part of that story too. Can you talk about the role that she played?
Lynn Garafola:
In the mid-1980s, Nancy Baer, who alas is no longer with us—she was a curator at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and had done a couple of ballet exhibitions—did an exhibition about Nijinska, and it opened in New York at the Cooper Hewitt, and it was full of things that no one had ever seen, because Nijinska never lent anything to exhibitions. She didn’t give interviews, saying, “And let me show you my collection,” nothing like that.
So because I knew Nancy and had been something of a historical advisor to her, I saw the show before it formally opened, and it was just astonishing to see the costumes, to see the designs by Alexandra Exter, to see some of her drawings, especially some of the very earlier ones, which almost seemed like things done with magnets and where she’s trying to deal with floor space in a very, very abstract way. It was just filled with so much stuff.
And suddenly after the opening, everyone looked at one another and said, “Oh, she seems to be someone who was doing things perhaps even before Balanchine in terms of abstract things.” But believe me, before that exhibition, people were simply not talking about it. Balanchine was the inventor of abstract ballet, or plot-less ballet, as he actually preferred, and I think most of them—and even Massine was totally passed over. So I think there has been gradually a growing recognition that abstraction or abstract elements were present in ballet in the 1920s and 1930s in the work of a number of different choreographers, who also did narrative work as well. And that even if their work was not identical, that they’re part of, you might say, a broad-based movement.
And of course, that also includes modern dance as well. Think of some of Graham’s work from the 1930s as opposed to the 1940s, and it too has many abstract elements. So I think the broadening that she adds, I think, tremendously to the story, and when you see Les Noces, thanks to Ashton, we know that abstraction is very much there.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I also hadn’t realized until reading your book just how much she had played with gender roles in her choreography and also as a performer. Can you talk about how and why she was experimenting in that way?
Lynn Garafola:
I think she considered herself in many ways to be a woman, but also to have characteristics that weren’t necessarily the traits of a ballerina, the traits of a submissive female person. And I think that comes across in a lot of her work, in the way she refused to play, offstage, the ballerina role that Diaghilev certainly wanted her to do, so that when he took her around to places and said, “Oh, this is my young ballerina, da-da-da-da.”
But I don’t know. It’s hard for me to say exactly why. She never really wrote about why she did that. She probably might have claimed, “Well, someone had to do it, and I was there.” Certainly, when she danced her brother’s role in Afternoon of a Faun, that was something I actually asked her daughter, Irina, about. I knew Irina somewhat and actually wrote about her for Dance Magazine a thousand years ago. But Irina would just say, “Oh, no, no. Diaghilev wanted her to do that. She didn’t want to do that.”
But clearly when you see that there were so many of these travesty roles that she danced, but there had to be something more to it. Things that she did for her own company, where she could do whatever she wanted, she did a wonderful role called Pedrolino, which is kind of a Chaplinesque role, for herself. Another one for a ballet that for her was very important and kind of vanished after three performances or two was Hamlet. There were negative reviews of that, and there were some reviews that really tried to capture what was so special about her as this sort of thrilling performer. And also some of the magical staging ideas that she had to show the death of Ophelia. You didn’t have a stream for Ophelia to throw herself into, but she had this sort of long scarf, very much like the fabric that you see in The King and I or that you see in Revelations, and that was lowered, and eventually the dancers kind of sunk behind that into the water. Everyone spoke about it, even people who didn’t like the ballet spoke about that really magical moment.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Since so many of these works are lost to history, I really enjoyed in your book the way that you cited critics from the time and their reactions to these premieres. Can you talk a little more about how not only critics, but also fellow members of the ballet world, reacted to some of Nijinska’s less conventional approaches to ballet?
Lynn Garafola:
There certainly were some critics who did not like what she did with the ballerina role. For many, many critics, the ballerina was the center of the ballet, especially more conservative critics like André Levinson. “What was a ballet without a ballerina?” And he basically set himself up as Nijinska’s implacable enemy from about 1923 until 1931. There were certain things he found unforgivable—what he called, at some point, the Marxism of her choreography, the fact that she had stayed in the Soviet Union until 1921, which is exactly when he stayed, but that she had never denounced the Soviet Union the way many emigres had.
The fact is her company was supported by the government, the emerging Bolshevik arts bureaucracy. Of course, what did it mean to be supported? It meant that you got a delivery of wood, you got some food, you got higher rations. This is a time when everyone is practically starving. You also got a place to perform, so you were able to support a company. This was hardly like being in the lap of luxury, but he never forgave her. And of course, she never did denounce the Soviet Union. So I think that was one thing.
I was also intrigued by what many critics had to say about her musicality and the way she would weave together music and movement in very subtle and very sophisticated ways. Very often, Levinson would criticize her because he felt she was just doing what her brother did, that is to say, imitating Dalcroze. Dalcroze along with Marx were two of his bête noires. But what I discovered was that he was almost quoting reviews he had written many times before. In fact, the first time he does it in French, for Les Noces, the phrase was virtually identical to his review in Russian of The Rite of Spring, the exact same phrase, and this would be brought up again and again and again. And the problem with Levinson was he was so erudite and knew so much about dance and so much about ballet that critics who actually thought a little bit differently, who were also very sophisticated, but fundamentally music critics, although they’d seen a great deal of dance in their time, would very often follow Levinson. You’d see by their second review echoes of the Levinsonian diatribe.
Other critics responded, I think, what they perceived as what was not feminine about her. Jean Cocteau basically said her body is a machine. And other critics would either forget about her—when Arnold Haskell came to write Balletomania, he had a chapter on the four choreographers that included her brother. These were Diaghilev’s choreographers, and amazingly, she wasn’t there, yet she was very much alive. He could have interviewed her, but he never bothered to. Then in another book later on, he interviewed her. But of course, that other book has not been reissued time and time again.
There were other critics who really commented physically about her as though her body were fair game, and this could include women critics. In fact, I was stunned to read Arlene Croce’s obituary for Nijinska in Ballet Review, where she talks about seeing Nijinska shuffling into Jacob’s Pillow in the late 1960s, almost her distended ears and these other things. It was just as though she were taking, parsing every piece of her body in a way that was extremely unpleasant, especially coming from a leading woman critic. Others would make remarks about her on all kinds of things, but very often this physical business.
And then there were also dancers who would do that too. There’s one point in the 1930s when was wearing gloves in rehearsal, these white gloves, I think she picked this up from Ida Rubenstein, who used to always wear white gloves, and Baranova, Danilova, they all talked about the white gloves in their autobiographies as though that made her really freakish. Just the way it was done, it was, at times, very unpleasant to read.
And then there were also a lot of criticisms that she was tough in class. She wanted you to pay attention in rehearsal. You couldn’t just go off and then wander back in. You couldn’t just slouch over. You were supposed to pay attention and learn. And a lot of the men in particular rebelled against that. This was like the school marm, and if she was mad at you, she had no qualms about it. But there were funny stories about this. Jerome Robbins—
Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, I love this story.
Lynn Garafola:
—he just didn’t like her, and he would wander in, he would do something, make some gesture, get everyone laughing, and she was fit to be tied. And when you think of his reputation as a …
Margaret Fuhrer:
Fast forward a decade or two, yeah.
Lynn Garafola:
…as a choreographer, that’s exactly what he would not allow anyone to do. He would go crazy. But I think there was definitely a gender component, and also, I think, an annoyance on the part of the men that they had to work so hard.
And also, I think some of the Russians in the 1930s and ’40s, there was a sense of entitlement. She, herself, never felt she had any sense of entitlement, and it’s curious, too, that she really liked a lot of American dancers that she ran into, including some in the 1930s who came from nowhere, but they turned up at an audition, and she liked them because they worked hard. They didn’t have that sense of entitlement.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I wanted to talk to you about Nijinska’s own writing. Because some of it, of course, has already been published, her early memoirs. But you also looked at her diaries, her letters, her choreographic notes, all of this material. What did that reveal about her as an artist and a person that previous accounts of her life had not?
Lynn Garafola:
Well, it revealed that she was a writer, and she just could never let anything go. At a certain point, nothing was ever finished. Things would be redone and redone and redone. At some point in the late ’20s, early ’30s, I would find three and four versions of a diary, because she would start copying them, and then as she started copying, things she’d add and things would change, she was correcting, but it wasn’t just correcting. I do know that there were times she expected to publish certain things, but unless someone truly pulled it away from her, it just wasn’t going to happen.
But diaries can tell you many things. They can at least fill in some of the factual gaps. Hers did that a little bit, but not that much, because the ones I found tended to be, the entries often were more sporadic. When she was working really hard, she really didn’t get time to take notes. So that during the period she’s creating Les Noces and Les Biches and Le Train Bleu, she is so busy that she just didn’t have time to write.
But also, the number of letters that she wrote. She was a letter writer. She kept writing letters to people, and that was really important. I loved some of her epistolary friendships. Her friendship at the end of her life with Vera Krasovskaya, the Russian ballet historian in St. Petersburg, or Leningrad then, was wonderful, and she loved being in touch with her. Krasovskaya wrote to her, asking for information about Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring. She was writing a chapter in her book on late 19th, early 20th century Russian ballet, and she needed information. Well, Nijinska immediately sits down and writes 10 pages back to her, and it’s really astonishing to see these things going back and forth.
And Nijinska often kept drafts. By then, she would keep very often the draft or the last typed copy of something so that you had a copy of some sort. And it was very touching. They did meet briefly in Paris, although there’s no record of how that went, because this is against the background of the Cold War, and that moment of opening during the thaw that was about to go cold again.
But it was wonderful to reconnect and also to reconnect with with some of her students from the School of Movement, her Kyiv group, many of whom were in Moscow. And with one of them, there was a real correspondence, it was wonderful, and some of the letters are quite reflective. The big question, what would’ve happened if I had never left? And of course the big question mark, would she have survived the late 1930s? Would she have done great works? She certainly would’ve had greater stability in that her company would’ve been supported. And of course, they don’t want to talk about other things, either. They obviously survived, but what had they undergone, what had happened to their family and friends?
So in these letters, there are also absences, silences, but they’re still wonderful to read, and I was so glad to be able to end the book on a very positive note, because there were some decades and some chapters which were—
Margaret Fuhrer:
Pretty hard.
Lynn Garafola:
Yeah, hard. And also in that last bit of her life, she had this wonderful relationship with the Central Ballet of Buffalo, which I wrote during the pandemic. In fact, it was during the pandemic that I interviewed via Zoom many of the dancers who had been part of that company. They were very, very young, so it was wonderful to do that and have their written as well as oral testimony as to what she had given them and things they remembered about her, and they remembered a tremendous amount.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Well, here’s another huge question to end on, speaking of what Nijinska has given us: How do you see her influence in ballet choreography and ballet performance today?
Lynn Garafola:
That is a really tough one. I don’t think we really see terribly much, except insofar as the two works that are still in repertory from the 1920s. These are works, though, that are not performed very much. There was a period when they were performed quite a lot, and then Irina Nijinska, her daughter, passed, and the Oakland Ballet, which had been a kind of repository of her works, changed. And therefore, there seems to have been a kind of stop once again. Also, Les Noces is a very, very difficult ballet to do. You need a large cast, you need a lot of rehearsal time, and to do it right, you need the musical components, which mean four concert pianists, you need a chorus, you need soloists, and you need a percussion ensemble. This means it’s very, very…
Margaret Fuhrer:
Expensive.
Lynn Garafola:
Yes. Now, it’s interesting to note that in 1989, rather just before Dance Theatre of Harlem had a major financial crisis, they did a Nijinska evening, including Les Noces, and apparently the Les Noces was wonderful. I remember it. And Arthur Mitchell had found the Harlem Boys Choir and all these different things so he could have live music, so it had the really full impact. But it was hugely expensive for a company like DTH. In recent years, I’ve only seen it at the Royal ballet, which brings it back periodically, as well as Les Biches.
I think there is, that Les Noces, because it’s special and because you can use recordings, it does have another life, which is separate from the Nijinska choreography, although—because of the Stravinsky score, which is really very powerful, and that, in many respects, it still maintains the basic libretto that Nijinska set out, which is her libretto. It’s not what you hear if you know Stravinsky’s words. So I think that has an afterlife, although it’s not had anything like the afterlife of The Rite of Spring, which is to say numerous remakings and recreations and rethinkings of it, but there have been some.
Another problem with Nijinska is that a work like Les Biches is very difficult to do, not because of the music being exceptionally complicated, not because of the technique being exceptionally complicated, or the size of the ensemble, but because of the style. It’s very difficult. It’s almost the way we’re talking about, before about Le Train Bleu, it’s very difficult to get that sophisticated quality of a certain period, the 1920s.
So I’m not entirely sure what else lies there, except the larger idea that it is possible for women to make wonderful ballets as well as to make ballets that are serviceable and really make a few lemons. I think that one of the problems is when you get a choreographer’s night by this group or that group or some other group, chances are it’s not going to be great. And that’s, of course, what happens whenever you get three ballets on a program, and chances are it’s going to be mediocre. It’s the right to be mediocre. You do not have to be great, but you should have the right, just as much as someone else, to be mediocre.
As I say, I think the struggles that she went through and the way she had to prove herself again and again and again, so she was always, in a sense, starting at the bottom, is something I’ve heard from many women ballet choreographers during the last 20 years, that they always felt they were starting anew. They couldn’t build on what they had. And maybe it’s because everything is lost or maybe it’s just that women have to prove themselves more than men.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I feel, reading the book, that was one of the things that I kept feeling, too, was so much has changed, but in many ways, so little has changed. Hopefully we are on a path now where there is some change beginning to happen. I feel like there are hopeful signs.
Lynn Garafola:
Yes, there are signs, but in terms of ballet specifically, I’m waiting for the time when they will take someone who is not ballerina material, but is a good dancer, into the corps because they recognize that this person has talent. It happens again and again and again with young men, but it does not happen with young women. It’s almost as though in ballet, if you go from being a dancer, you have to go from being a principal dancer into being a choreographer, male or female, because it’s the fame, the celebrity as a dancer that then brings …
Margaret Fuhrer:
Permission.
Lynn Garafola:
… permission to the choreographer. And that doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the choreography or anything else. It’s just that celebrity.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We could keep unpacking this for another few hours, for sure. Listeners, the book also explores so much more. We really barely scratched the surface of what the book covers. La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern is out now from Oxford University Press. We have links in the show notes with information about where you can find it. And Lynn, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for giving us this master class today.
Lynn Garafola:
Well, I hope you enjoy it. I hope you read the book, everyone out there, because I know you have, Margaret, and thank you, Margaret, for reading it so closely and for having me.
[pause]
Thanks again to Lynn for being so generous with her time and knowledge. As promised we have that link in the show notes with more information about La Nijinska, which by the way is not just a fascinating history but also a beautiful piece of writing—I love the richness of Lynn’s writing. I hope you’ll give it a read.
And thanks to all of you for subscribing to The Dance Edit Extra. I’ll see you back here in two weeks for another new episode. Have a great weekend, everyone.