Colloquium Series: “Discourses of Memory: The Marginalization of Bronislava Nijinska.”

The marginalization of a choreographer typically has many causes.  However, in Nijinska’s case, discourse – what people wrote about her – almost certainly played a crucial role in determining how she was perceived from the start of her choreographic career in the West in the early 1920s until the 1960s, when The Royal Ballet’s revivals of Les Biches (1964) and Les Noces (1966) began the process of solidifying her reputation as a major modernist artist.  This talk suggests that despite her stature, evident in the numerous companies with which she was affiliated over the decades, she seldom received her due from critics, historians, and even dancers.  Again and again her accomplishments were disparaged, her works misrepresented, and her presence both as a dancer and a choreographer slighted or ignored.  All too often, she remained a shadow on the sidelines of her own history, the sister of ballet legend Vaslav Nijinsky.

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.  A former Getty Scholar, she is a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers as well as a 2016 Dance Magazine Award.  Editor for several years of the book series Studies in Dance History, she has written for Dance Magazine, Dance Research,, The Nation, and many other publications.  A member of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and the organizer of conferences, symposia, and public programs on the history of ballet and twentieth-century dance generally, she is currently working on a book about the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska.