Lynn Garafola, leading expert on dance from New York, will show images and video that trace the revolution in dance Bronislava Nijinska initiated in Kyiv in 1919. She will describe Nijinska's outstanding modernist ballets in Paris and New York, as well as her work in Hollywood.
Bronislava Nijinska was a leading member of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and a choreographer who created landmark works of ballet modernism. She was born in Minsk in 1890 to itinerant Polish dancers, and worked in Kyiv, in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, where she founded an experimental studio, the School of Movement, and choreographed her first abstract works. Emigrating in 1921, she pursued her career on three continents, eventually settling in southern California. Here she opened a new studio and choreographed the dances Max Reinhardt’s classic film A Midsummer Night’s Dream. During World War II, she created several ballets in New York with the Kyiv-born painter and stage designer Boris Aronson.
Lynn Garafola is Professor 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.
The event will be in English.
Remember to bring your passport or driver's license.