Bronislava Nijinska

Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) was a Russian-Polish dancer and choreographer, the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky, and one of the most significant choreographers of the twentieth century. She trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg and danced with the Ballets Russes from its founding. After a period in Kiev establishing her own studio, she rejoined Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1921, where she created her two masterpieces: Les Noces (1923), a stark, hieratic depiction of a Russian peasant wedding ceremony to Stravinsky's score, and Les Biches (1924), a work of sophisticated ambiguity set to music by Francis Poulenc. Les Noces is widely considered one of the great ballets of the twentieth century, remarkable for its modernist abstraction and its fusion of folk tradition with avant-garde form. After the Ballets Russes, she worked for numerous companies and choreographed a vast body of work, though much of it was lost. She settled in the United States after World War II.