Resurrection

Abstract 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.