Reintroducing Bronislava Nijinska!
The following is a guest post by Archivist Morgen Stevens-Garmon, who shares the story behind the Bronislava Nijinska Collection, which is now fully accessible for Library of Congress patrons.
It is a fairly simple procedure: a collection comes in, it’s processed by an archivist or team of archivists and technicians, and a finding aid is written and made available. Very straightforward. And that is pretty much what happened with the Bronislava Nijinska Collection, but with a couple of twists and turns along the way. But before I get into that, let’s get into who was Bronislava Nijinska.
Born in Minsk, Belarus, on January 8, 1891 (Happy birthday, Bronislava!) to a dancing family, Bronislava Nijinska followed the career route set by her older brother, Vaslav Nijinsky. She studied ballet at Russia’s Imperial Theater School, graduating in 1908. She went on to dance with the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev and in work choreographed by Nijinsky. Though her brother’s poor health cut his career short, Nijinska’s career only grew. Nijinska founded her own school in Kyiv in 1919 complete with a manifesto titled “On Movement and the School of Movement.” By the 1920s, she had moved primarily into the role of choreographer, creating works for Diaghilev, Ida Rubinstein, and Marquis George de Cuevas as well as for her own companies. In 1938, she became the founding director of the Polish Ballet, which toured throughout Germany and England. In 1939, Nijinska immigrated to the United States, working for Ballet Theatre (later named American Ballet Theatre) and the Ballet Repertory Company in Chicago. She also started another school in southern California. Nijinska created more than 80 dance works in her life and instructed hundreds of dancers, all of which cemented her legacy in modern ballet.
Nijinska died in 1972, but her work lived on thanks to the efforts of her daughter, Irina Nijinska. Irina oversaw restaging of some of her mother’s choreography, and she worked to get Nijinska’s autobiography, Early Memoirs (1981), published and translated into English. Irina and her husband, Gibbs S. Raetz, maintained Nijinska’s collection of original choreographic notes, design renderings, photographs, posters, programs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and writings. Gibbs continued making material available to scholars after Irina passed away in 1991, and in 1999, the Library of Congress acquired the entire collection.
Once at the Library, the collection was initially organized according to material type by several different staff members over a number of years. The resulting finding aid included detailed summaries and translations of material originally written in French and Russian (Nijinska’s primary languages). It was, however, over 300 pages long and not accessible or searchable through the Library’s online catalog. In 2023, the collection was reorganized so that different material types from the same chorographic work were grouped together. For example, researchers interested in Nijinska’s iterations of Igor Stravinsky’s “Les noces” can find all of the relevant material listed together in the new finding aid. Previously unprocessed material was included in the reorganization, and information on the roughly 1,700 books collected by Nijinska was attached to the finding aid as an appendix. The translations and summaries were also moved to appendices. Despite adding in more material, the reorganization transformed the finding aid to a more manageable 63 pages.
The new finding aid for materials in the Bronislava Nijinska Collection is now searchable. Portions of the collection that were digitized are available here as part of the Library’s digital collections. We continue to update the digital records with information that came to light during processing, so be sure to check back.
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