Highlights from a 2022 PillowTalk with Lynn Garafola, author of the biography La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern speaking with scholar-in-residence Brian Schaefer. Garafola illuminates Bronislava Nijinska’s life as a Russian born dancer, sibling to Vaslav Nijinsky, and groundbreaking 20th century ballet choreographer. Garafola also shares some fascinating documentation of Nijinska's pivotal connections to Jacob's Pillow.
[Music begins, composed by J.S. Bach, performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: Welcome to PillowVoices, a production of Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival with content from the Pillow Archives. I'm Norton Owen, the Pillow’s Director of Preservation, and it's my pleasure to introduce this episode featuring a 2022 PillowTalk with Lynn Garafola, author of the biography La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern speaking with scholar-in-residence Brian Schaefer. Garafola brings to light Bronislava Nijinska’s life as a Russian born dancer, sibling to Vaslav Nijinsky, and groundbreaking choreographer for ballet in the 20th century. Garafola also shares some fascinating documentation of Nijinska's pivotal connections to Jacob's Pillow.
Brian Schaefer: My name is Brian Schaefer. I'm one of the scholars and residents here at Jacob's Pillow. It's a pleasure to welcome you to our PillowTalk today on La Nijinska with our special guests, Lynn Garafola. Thank you so much for being here. So Lynn Garafola is a historian, critic, a professor of dance at Barnard College. In addition to her new book, La Nijinska, which we will be discussing, she's the author of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. She contributes articles and essays regularly to scholarly and general interest publications and is the former editor of the book series, Studies in Dance History. She's been a guest curator for dance exhibitions at the New York Historical Society, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and other institutions. She's a former Getty Scholar, a recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That is all very abridged, and I will, I will leave it there, but that is just a taste of the many accomplishments. I'd love to know if you can just share your relationship with Bronislava Nijinska. When did you first meet her, so to speak?
Lynn Garafola: Well, I never knew Bronislava Nijinska in life. She died in 1972 and I was then really just beginning to discover ballet as something that I was interested in writing about. But it's as I began working on my book about Diaghilev that I encountered her, that I saw my first productions of Les Noces and Les Biches, both on tape as well as on the stage, and just became fascinated with this woman, who within this pretty all male Diaghilev circle had created such remarkable ballets. So I, another thing that drew me even deeper into her was that in the early 1980s, I met Nancy Van Norman Baer. Nancy Van Norman Baer was a curator working at the San Francisco Museums of Fine Arts. And she told me that she was going to be doing an exhibition about Nijinska. And I said, if you need any help, let me know. If you need any historical advice, let me know. And lo and behold, I found myself giving a lot of advice and doing a lot of editing. But that was a way of then discovering, you might say, the material artifacts that were in the Nijinska collection, which at that time was in Pacific Palisades, where her daughter lived. And no one had ever seen it. And so suddenly out came these drawings that Nijinska had done while she was still in Kiev, during a formative moment of her, of her career as an, as an artist. During the same period, um, she, uh, she also, became friends with artists such as Vadym Meller and Aleksandra Ekster, important Ukrainian-Russian artists, and their works were in her collection and no one knew that she had ever done this. This was like a carefully guarded secret. So, that exhibition, I think, was really key, and the research I did for that was really key in, in encouraging my thinking about Nijinska.
Brian Schaefer: And my understanding is that this is the first major biography of her, and she's someone that , while she is obviously well known in the, in the ballet world, is not someone who has been given the kind of, scholarly attention that she deserved, and that you make quite clear that she has earned. Why do you think that is?
Lynn Garafola: Well, I think there are any number of reasons. First of all, she was her brother's sister. And I say it that way, the Shakespeare's sister syndrome. We know a great deal about Shakespeare, but less about his sister. Part of the reason was that this sister wrote a great deal, but published very, very little. In fact, even Early Memoirs, which was her, which was a memoir ostensibly about herself until, up until maybe World War I, in fact, is mostly about her brother and only secondarily about herself. So, this is, and this was, she couldn't even get herself together to publish it during her lifetime. I mean, she kept saying, I have my book to do, my book to do, my book to do, and then I, a letter would come and said, would you stage Les Noces for, for us? And of course she dropped the book and run off to stage Les Noces. So there, but I think it runs deeper. And that was very problematic. But the whole myth of her brother, in which she's very incidental, she may be, she may be mentioned, but not really talked much about, is really, is particularly, is I think one of the real problems. And there were people like Lincoln Kirstein, for instance, who spoke to her, whom she sought out and spoke to several times in the mid 1930s, around the time when the American Ballet, his first company with Balanchine, was getting started. And he seemed to be terribly interested in everything she was saying. They were speaking French. Except when it really came time to, down to it, he really wanted access to the photographs she had of her brother, which he didn't have. And as we know, he collected Nijinsky photographs. But it's one of these stories after another, after another. Her dismissal or cavalier treatment by any number of historians, of critics. I mean, I've read things that are really horrible about Nijinska. Now I've read things that perhaps show her to be less than conciliatory at times. Really a tough person in the studio. But never some of the writing that I've read about her. The dismissals. The cavalier writings. Yes.
Brian Schaefer: And I did want to ask you about her relationship with Nijinsky and also, how you chose to approach that in terms of how much you wanted to bring him into to your book because obviously he has occupied so much space in the mythology of ballet in the 20th century but you, you don't give him a whole lot of space in your book. And I know a lot of your interest is to kind of remove her from the shadow, from his shadow. So how did you navigate that embarking on the book?
Lynn Garafola: Well, it was very hard at first, because he's so much, he's so there. But it's one of the reasons why I didn't really go into the very early life, because the early life would have relied heavily on her own book, Early Memoirs. I wouldn't have been able to contribute very much. And it would have been overshadowed by him and his achievements. One of the important things I did was, I kept feeling that there was, that in all this adulation in early memoirs for her brother, and this adulation that you find even later, that in fact there's some, there's anger underlying it. And that's what I, one of the things I was trying to tease out. The anger, the anxiety, the, something that existed before everything was clouded over by his terrible illness. Because remember, when he became ill, she walked into the sanatorium in Vienna, this is in 1921 and he's catatonic. You haven't seen your brother since 1914 when he was dancing and alive and talking and now he's catatonic. He doesn't recognize her, doesn't recognize his own mother. I was trying to go back before that period and before the myth that she herself had created about her brother that in a way he could almost do no wrong. He's Saint Nijinsky. And that's, and he too was clearly much more complicated than that.
Brian Schaefer: And we'll put him aside now so we don't give him more attention (audience laughs). We'll go back to her.
Lynn Garafola: Thank you!
Brian Schaefer: So Nijinska was a well regarded dancer in her own right before she was a choreographer. Can you set the scene for the ballet world that she entered as, as a dancer, as a performer? So what was happening in ballet at that time where she was, and what was her path to starting her performance career?
Lynn Garafola: Well, she was the child of Polish born, Warsaw born dancers who had been ballet dancers who were trained at the Wielki Theatre, in Warsaw, and then had decided when they graduated that they would go off and dance in the southern and western reaches of the Russian Empire. This is the whole area that today is, that we're now talking about Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and various other parts. And this is where her parents danced. Vaslav was born in Kyiv. She was born in, in Minsk, in other words, in Belarus. The other one was born in what, Tbilisi in, in Georgia. So this is the world that she inhabited as a very young child until her mother decided that they had to have solid ballet training and she moved the entire family to St. Petersburg. At that point, pulling every string she possibly could, which meant finding every Pole in the ballet world, and drawing them in. She succeeded in getting two of the children to the Imperial Theatre School, which is where they received their fundamental education and of course their ballet training. At the time, this was probably the best ballet training that one could find. She graduated in 1908. He graduated a few years before. But I would say that's where she received her technical training and where she received her, grounding in the late 19th century Russian repertoire, repertory. It's really when she joins the Ballets Russes, which Diaghilev formed in 1909, that her life took off in a very, very different direction. When she began to think, this is what art is. Not what I have been doing, as the 14th Swan or the 27th Bayadère in, uh, or 27th Shade in La Bayadère. I, this is what I want to do. And when she saw her brother, being formed by Diaghilev into a choreographer, who would ultimately choreograph the Rite of Spring, she also decided that this is what I want to do. I know it's terribly hard, but she wanted to do it. Later on, she said, no, no, no, no, no, I never discovered it so early, etc., etc. There was this great line of denial. But in the, but that's when she decided that she wanted to be a choreographer and Diaghilev simply didn't want to further. However there were two formative events in terms of her becoming a choreographer. One, that she was separated from her brother. That he remained in Western Europe. World War I broke out. She had returned to Russia. So therefore, there was no possibility of being under his influence for a number of years. Secondly, the Russian Revolution happened and by then she was in Kyiv and at that point everything seemed to break down. Everything was possible, every, you know, destruction and creation and there was this release of tremendous creativity in the years immediately following the Russian Revolution and this for her was, I think, the thing that opened her, was the key that opened the entire possibility and early realization of her choreographic ambitions.
Brian Schaefer: When she was finding her voice as a choreographer, I mean, she really wrote kind of manifestos rejecting kind of the, the Russian choreographers, Petipa, that had come before. So what, what was her philosophy toward choreography, toward movement?
Lynn Garafola: She would write in these very early treatises that almost any kind of movement could do. She wanted to form an educated dancer, not a professional as she had been. She basically wanted to do pure research at that point and everything else she felt, felt was contaminated by filthy lucre. She also parted company with the, the prostitution that underlay much of, many of the relationships between the Russian, the ballet, the official ballet, and its audience, and, les Romains, and wealthy supporters. In fact, she uses the word cocotte, which in France, in French means a, a, a prostitute, as describing many of the dancers and that relationship. So she wanted a, an entirely clear, you know, clean slate, you know, throw everything out. But not everything. Because she did still teach ballet technique. It may have been taught differently. It may have been taught in a somewhat different fashion. But nevertheless, she did feel that that was a foundation. And that she felt that was the baby that shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater. Everything else could go. But that was something worth keeping. Not necessarily that it had to be en pointe, that it had to be stylistically, like what it looked like in 1890, or 1910, but that it was the key to moving this thing called ballet or dance into the future. And the studio that she had, the school, was called, not the School of Dance, not the, God knows, not the School of Ballet, but the School of Movement, which I think is a very significant thing. And movement was something that she was constantly trying to define in her multiple attempts at writing a thesis. None of which she, a manifesto, none of which she ever published. Although, well, one she may have published, but no one's ever seen it. Someone, there was apparently in one of the museum, a libraries in St. Petersburg, there was a catalog card, you know, an entry, with a call number, but there was nothing at the call number. So, so that leads me to suspect that there was something published. And there were a few copies around, but they just haven't survived. But in any event, this thing of what movement is, and this is something that she again and again tried to inculcate in her dancers, even no matter what they were doing, the simplest thing, the movement she felt was the absolute basic thing of dance.
Brian Schaefer: Her relationship with Diaghilev and Ballets Russes was very complicated, to say the least. As someone who wrote the definitive history of the Ballets Russes, I'm curious what it was like for you to revisit that world, to revisit those characters, but to do so now from her perspective. Did it illuminate anything kind of new for you?
Lynn Garafola: Well, it did. It illuminated things that I had been learning and thinking about in the intervening years. The Ballets Russes book was first published in 1989. So I had done a whole lot between, between that. I think even the way I thought about what a choreographer is had changed as one began seeing dances that were being choreographed by people with a great deal of input from other people, etc., etc. But, I, I would say that I found myself questioning at every point my sources. And trying to add to the sources, which would allow me to get away from a lot of the secondary sources. On the other hand, Diaghilev himself emerges always as a fascinating character. Nijinska adored him. And at the same time, she hated him. When he died, she threw herself on the ground, weeping, during the, the Orthodox, in the Orthodox Cathedral in Paris, during his, requiem service. He was the man who in a sense was closest to her, closer to her than a father. Her own father had dumped the family and gone off with, he had gone off with another woman. And he was the one who gave her away at both her weddings, you know. Which is hard to believe. And then, but then by the same token, when he treated her professionally, he allowed her to do certain things, which perhaps he wouldn't have allowed someone else to do, like Les Noces. He basically allowed her to go with her own voice, and control the look of the entire thing. But on the other hand, he, you know, would say, you No, we're doing this. He would select repertory and he'd say, this is your assignment. And she'd say, and she couldn't say, I don't want that assignment. I want another assignment. It was, that was it. And then I think he overworked her tremendously, turned her into a chain, uh, chain smoker. I don't think he ever overworked his subsequent choreographers quite as badly. And, it just, I mean, I saw facets of Diaghilev, that's dictatorial part, which I saw, which I knew existed and had seen in other cases, but this time I saw it close up. And I think this is one of the things that biography enables you to do. Because you're looking at particularities, it enables you to see close up how something may have reacted, how something may have transpired in a way that you wouldn't have otherwise.
[Musical interlude]
Brian Schaefer: I'd like to talk a bit about her choreography now. And we'll get into the two pieces that we know the best from her, but she also created dozens of other works.
Lynn Garafola: Yes.
Brian Schaefer: Most of which we don't get to see now. Can you share a little bit about her lesser known works and maybe one or two that interested you and how you, how you researched these dozens of dances that she made that there's not really much record for.
Lynn Garafola: Well, thank goodness for critics (laughs). I know most of the time people say, no, they're not that happy about critics, but critics write. And critics, especially in the older, in the long ago days, used to have a lot more space than they have today, which means they would often describe things. And happily for me, I was writing, I was researching this book at a time when a lot of material had been digitized and was available, on the internet. So I was able to, for instance, not rely on what people said the reception of a this or that work was. But I was able to perhaps have ten reviews. which perhaps called into question what André Levinson might have said, or what Diaghilev in a, in a moment, in a giddy moment might have written to Serge Lifar, or some of the, or what perhaps someone who disliked Nijinska intensely might have written. So I was able to assemble a kind of data bank, I mean, sounds silly, but you know, just all of these reviews and other articles, that, enabled me to get a better picture of the, of the work. I also was doing much more research, with music. Music, personalities, music, looking at music reviews. Many reviews were written by musicians, but some were specifically music reviews. And that also gave me an, a much better idea about how she specifically dealt with music. The relationship with music. She herself would say, the most important thing to me is music when I do my ballets. So therefore, what she was doing with music was certainly of some import. And this was something that the music critics picked up on. I'm very grateful to the internet and to Gallica, which is the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French National Library, which digitized dozens of newspapers up to World War II. So at that point Nijinska had migrated to the U.S. So happily I had lots of material for that. And that gave me an independent point of view that otherwise, which enabled me to liberate myself from things that were handed down. But also to have a sense of some of these ballets, or sometimes they were, extended ballets in operas, which she did, and which made it clear to me that this was very complex work, that it was, in some instances, brilliant. There are a few I would really like to see. I'd like to see her Baiser de la Fée, which got some very fine reviews, although it did have Ida Rubinstein, who was perhaps not the easiest person to choreograph for, since she wanted to be a classical ballerina, but wasn't really a classical ballerina. I'm also very interested in this Legend of Cracow, a ballet, totally unknown here, which was done in 1937 for the Polish Ballet, which had a contemporary Russian, a contemporary Polish composer, and which was set in this medieval period. And it was apparently fascinating. One of the critics for the Dancing Times, their Paris critic, went back again and again and again to see this. This is unusual for a critic. They don't do it unless they're really fascinated by something. And kept saying, every time I would look at a different part of the stage, there'd be something new happening, something, and, and, and then there would be certain group movements, and ensemble movements, and movement through space that he thought was brilliant. Another one I'd like to see is Chopin Concerto, which he did during that same season, and revived a number of times, including at the Hollywood Bowl. And that was one of the ballets that was done here, at the Pillow. Chopin Concerto for this for students. It was then done for the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, as were other ballets. And then basically dropped very shortly after Balanchine became Artistic Director of the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo. It was then later revived and performed here in the late 1960s by the Center Ballet of Buffalo, which has many titles, but it was a Buffalo based company. It was probably advanced students, advanced professional students, but there's a teeny bit of stuff here about that. But that I would really like to see, and I, I think we've just missed being able to bring it back. And another one I'd love to see is the first one she did for ABT, which is La Fille mal gardée. She did this wonderful Fille mal gardée, remained in repertory for years, modified a little bit by this one or that. But it was apparently wonderful. Everyone thought it was, you know, the first, you know, a revival. Of course it wasn't a revival. No one knows what was done in 1789. It was Nijinska. But apparently it was wonderful and the, Nijinska chose Patricia Bowman, who had been the former ballerina of the Radio City Music Hall, to be her Lise, who was apparently also wonderful. You know, so there are these things that show a very, the diversity of her output as well as the quality of it.
Brian Schaefer: And the two that we do know the best, Les Noces and Les Biches, maybe you could pick your favorite of them and help us understand why and how they epitomize her style, her philosophy, her approach to, to choreography and to theater.
Lynn Garafola: Oh, that's hard. But I'll talk about Les Noces. Because Les Noces is definitely her masterwork. Les Noces is her masterwork, partly because it was a masterwork by Stravinsky, musically. It was a piece of music that, debuted, premiered when Les Noces, the ballet, premiered in 1923 and epitomized, in many respects, the Soviet constructivism in, in terms of the choreography, that Nijinska had encountered when she was in Kyiv. Sorry, I keep going back and forth between Kiev and Kyiv, so forgive me (laughs).
Brian Schaefer: And it was really kind of striking and startling to read about when she was there and had to flee for, from war in Kiev exactly almost a hundred years ago.
Lynn Garafola: Yes.
Brian Schaefer: I mean it was, I'm, obviously you had no, no sense of parallel as you were writing it, but for the book to come out now and to read about her having to flee for the exact same reason was, was really striking.
Lynn Garafola: Yes, it was very striking, but also she lived through so much when she was there, in that the city changed hands, I don't know, 15, 20 times, and this one was bombing, that one was bombing, this one was drawing, this one was entering the city, the next group, between the Reds and the Whites and the Germans and the Ukrainians, and it was, it was a terrible time, but at the same time, hugely exciting. At some point, she received a letter from one of the artists she had collaborated with, this Vadym Meller, who, like her, had spent a fair amount of time in Western Europe before World War I. And he wrote, we were so idealistic then, meaning that period right after the revolution. And now it seems that moment has passed. He's writing in 1923. You know, but that euphoria, that sense that you could, that anything was possible, that I think she, she brought. But anyway, to go back to Les Noces. Les Noces is a highly abstract ballet, although I guess today we'd call it semi- abstract. It was a, Les Noces means wedding. Or in Russian, svadebka, it's a little wedding. And it's about a bride and a groom who are to be married. But, and there are four scenes, the departure of the bride, her braids are being, when her braids are prepared, she leaves. Then the departure of the groom and the lament of the mother who is leaving her, losing her daughter, and then finally the wedding. However, everyone is dressed alike. There is nothing festive about this. The, the braids are these very, very long braids, and they almost seem to decapitate the bride, as she's being led away. The groom is, seems to be surrounded by his young men and his group of young men and there is no pleasure there. And finally, the wedding feast, well, it's brilliant in the way the use of, the space is used in the, in the hammering, of the, of the rhythms. But it's certainly not a joyous occasion and it ends with a, with a pyramid, almost like a Meyerholdian pyramid. And, and, and as the, bells chime at the end, it's almost as though this is now going to be repeated. That this is a ritual, this is something that will be repeated, and repeated, and repeated. For Nijinska, it touched a really personal chord. She was very close to her mother. And when she wrote about her, you know, wrote about the pain of the young girl leaving her mother. As one of the underlying sources, sense of the, of the ballet. It was very poignant and, she would, and she also wrote, this is, this was an article, again, that she never published, but was published after her life in, after her death in Dance Magazine. It, it, she talks about here are two young people. They have no idea, they're being thrust together. They have no idea what will happen, especially the bride. She goes to the groom's house. What will happen to her? And the, overall, almost Soviet quality of the piece is in the fact that the bride and groom who are ostensibly characters, in fact, are non-characters, and that this is a mass work with a mass of dancers, the final, the final scene has something like between 32 and 35 dancers. In many instances all doing the same thing, so you can imagine the amount of rehearsal that takes. And moreover, they're all dressed alike. They're in something, they're in kind of abstractions of everyday Russian peasant wear. Pinafores and blouses, brown and white, kind of off white, and the same for the men who wear something like Russian shirts and trousers. The women aren't en pointe. They don't do very much en pointe, but nevertheless it gives a certain skittering quality to them when they do certain kinds of steps. So I would say that that dehumanization, and that, and this abstraction, semi- abstraction is probably, are probably two key things, of the, of the work. And, and also, and, and along with that, this sort of incipient, along with this modernism, this incipient neoclassicism, because all the dancers were en pointe, although no one was using pointe the way Petipa had used pointe in the 1890s in Sleeping Beauty, let's say. So it's a very significant work.
[Musical interlude]
Brian Schaefer: You've mentioned a few times, Jacob's Pillow.
Lynn Garafola: Yes.
Brian Schaefer: And Nijinska’s relationship to, to the Pillow here. Lynn uncovered some fabulous correspondence.
Lynn Garafola: It's not mine. It's the Pillow who has uncovered it (laughs).
Brian Schaefer: Pillow Archives. Yes.
Lynn Garafola: And Norton uncovered it for me.
Brian Schaefer: Thank you, Norton. It's Norton Owen, our Director of Preservation here.
Lynn Garafola: In 1942, Ted Shawn was organizing a huge festival, that was including the various foreign influences which had a definite bearing on American dance. There were programs of American folk dance, Spanish and Latin American dances, ballroom dance, et cetera, et cetera. And, oh, and Joseph Pilates was around teaching, stretching, and Nijinska was restaging two of her Hollywood Bowl works, Étude and Chopin Concerto, for the students at the Pillow. Shawn's letters to Barton Mumaw, which are here at the Pillow, give an often hilarious account of day to day life at the Pillow. "July 7th. My God, what a day it's been. First came word that Nijinska refused to teach her afternoon class on the hill. Then she decided she would. Then a wire that her star male dancer was arriving for the whole summer and as we had never heard of him, there is literally, not a bed on the place. I run smack into Nijinska and Singaevsky, [Singaevsky's her husband], and have a session with them. All gracious on both sides, but adamant on theirs that we do, we do have to take care of the male dancer eight weeks, plus paying them for performances. July 25th. The petty irritations go on constantly. One Leila Volkova, forced on us by Nijinska as a scholarship student, is leaving today because she won't walk from the hill down here for her meals and back. August 13th. Professor Aaron has quit. Says Madame Nijinska is completely unbearable. August 15th, Fern, [that's Fern Helscher, who was, the Pillow's business manager], had a terrible session with Singayevsky and Madame over the pianist problem. Fern went all to pieces and cried and Madame took Fern on her lap and comforted her. It was all so Russian. August 23rd. Yesterday was as mad a day as I have ever lived through. Fern had been hiding from Singaevsky all morning [audience and Garafola laugh]. Later I ran smack into Singayevsky and they jumped on me. I held fast and reiterated what we would do and what we wouldn't. Then Madame came and said she wanted to start it all over again, but I kissed her hand and ran from the house [audience and Garafola laugh]. They followed, they followed to the foot of the stage, and started to yell for Fern, and she had to come down. Then it raged, and I got fed up with it, and swooped down on them, and out yelled the Russians. Boy, it was a scene." Then after a few days, he's invited by Madame into the studio, and he's stunned. He wrote to Mumaw that he was simply amazed. "I'm simply amazed at what she has accomplished with beginners, mixed ages, sizes, backgrounds, she's achieved two ballets of completely professional finish. Stunning ballets, and it looks like an organization that has worked together for some time." And then he goes on to describe her Bach ballet. Which she called Étude, and it was a very early, all, you know, completely abstract work that she had created in the late 1920s, and was usually performed in Paris to enormous controversy, with people saying, yes, this is really, this is so moving, and other people saying, there has to be a plot to some, to ballet, et cetera, et cetera. In the end, he writes, "It was a great and memorable occasion, a genuine tribute to a truly great artist."
Brian Schaefer: Thank you so much for reading that. That, um, was such a treat to get insight (Garafola laughs). And to Ted Shawn and to, Nijinska and the antics at Jacob's Pillow with, which continue to this day, of course.
Lynn Garafola: I hope everyone's not yelling at one another (laughs).
Brian Schaefer: No, I, I hear no yelling here (Garafola continues to laugh). The next time she was here, uh, was almost 30 years later, I believe. Was that 1969 with the Center for Ballet in Buffalo?
Lynn Garafola: Yes. Yes. Yes.
Brian Schaefer: And you also share, I think from that visit, a little anecdote from Ann Hutchinson Guest, who was there at the time, who, you know, has, was a long time supporter of the Pillow, a long time treasure here. We lost her just this spring. She was 103, a world renowned, uh, for dance notation…
Lynn Garafola: In fact, she was going to be you.
Brian Schaefer: Oh she, uh…
Lynn Garafola: She was going to be my, my interlocutor (laughs).
Brian Schaefer: I'm happy to be here discussing with you (Garafola continues to laugh), but that would have been such a, such a joy to watch. So I'm sorry that we didn't get to experience that. You have a nice little anecdote of when she went for tea at Nijinska's place, but I'm sure you had a long conversation with her about it. And I'm curious, other things that you would maybe want to share from, from her, uh, recollections of Nijinska here?
Lynn Garafola: Well, her recollections were not actually the most positive. She expected her to speak more English than she did. Nijinska, by this time, did speak some English, although she tended to speak it as little as possible, and relied upon her husband as a translator. He was not the best translator. But she felt, I think she felt ashamed at her English, in a way that she did not feel ashamed of her French, which was not perfect. But nevertheless, she felt she could get by pretty easily in it. Also, she felt that she didn't, that is, Ann felt that she was not really a ballet person. Now that may have been one of the things that interested Nijinska about her, that she was a little bit different. In other words, Ann Guest had a great deal of training in England at Dartington. And that's where a lot of modern, something like modern dance training was being conducted, one of the few places in England at that time in the, in the 30s, where you could study something akin to modern dance. So when she came here, she had ballet, but she had other things in her body. And I think, um, Nijinska responded to that. In fact, she wouldn't have invited her for tea if she wasn't interested in her. She invited rather few people for tea. I don't think, Ann Guest, or Ann Hutchinson, as she was there, really grasped that much what Nijinska was up to. Or why Nijinska might have been feeling somewhat fraught. She was constantly looking for, for work, trying to find a place for herself in this American ballet polity at a time when numerous dancers had chosen to come to the United States, in 1939, when the war broke out and some even a few years earlier. So it was a very fraught time for her.
[Musical interlude]
Brian Schaefer: I'd love to hear a little bit about the process of writing a biography like this. If you could kind of walk us through the timeline of when you decided to embark on this journey, the kind of research that you undertook, the writing and the editing, and then how it ends up being this beautiful big book that we have today.
Lynn Garafola: You know, what I turned into to my editor was 30 percent longer. So (laughs). And it really hurt me to cut those words, or many of those words (continues to laugh). But I know it's a better read. My interest in her, you know, progressed. I was doing many other things. Some, I incorporated an important section about her into my Diaghilev book. But then I did many other things. I did a lot of editing. I wrote a number of essays. Did some exhibitions, etc. And then, there were also difficulties because at some moment I had been threatened with legal suit if I ever used anything from the archives when they were still within the family's purview. So that put me, that put me off for a while. And then at some point when the archives were moved to the Library of Congress, I thought, okay, let me now see what's what. So I began seeing, well, everyone said there was a second volume, but there never has appear, second volume has never appeared. Let's see if indeed there is a second volume. So there was no second volume. But what was very interesting was that as I began looking through a small part of the archives, was to discover things that Irina Nijinska, who edited Early Memoirs, had added to Early Memoirs, and material that she had incorporated, for instance, from other ballerinas, or other books that were published during the 1970s, and indeed, even from some Russian sources, about the, Nijinska hadn't written about the strike of 1905, but what had been incorporated was material from Telyakovsky's diaries. This kind of flabbergasted me, but anyway, I wrote a scholarly article and waited to be sued (audience laughs). I wasn't sued, and so then I began making journeys to the library and going through material and eventually, part of the problem was finding a working relationship with the Russian. I am not fluent in Russian. I know a little bit of Russian. So I had to figure out a relationship and how to use, how to get the material and get it to a translator and then what was, how that whole thing was going to work. So that really took, you know, it took a while. And then what else? Oh, then there were all kinds of things. You know, life intervenes. There's this thing, life. But I think the, I refuse to give a timeline to people. They'd say, well, when is it going to be finished? And I'd say, I don't know. I don't know how long it's going to be. And indeed, who knew anything about her two years in South America at the Teatro Colón. She did like five or six seasons down there. Who knew anything about it? No one. So you couldn't even say, okay, I've got a secondary source here that I can use. I had to find Argentine - you know, Buenos Aires newspapers to go through on microfilm even to see everything she had done there because she did a lot of opera ballets as, as well. So there was a lot of ferreting out of material. And then the whole thing of the Grand Ballet de Cuevas. I thought by the time I got to that, it was like, Oh my God, not another country. And not that I mind France, but not another ballet company, not another world. And not, you know, it just kind of went on and on and on. And then the pandemic came and I was working on the last chapter and I, this was my introduction to Zoom, because in the, we mentioned the Center Ballet of Buffalo, and I was in email contact with some people, but that was the first time I began using Zoom. I had never used it before, because I had retired from active teaching, when it was becoming something in the academy. And so, that was, I did a great deal of interviewing for that all virtual. So, that was a whole other, a whole other dimension. Because up to that point, I had used oral histories, I had maybe interviewed a couple of people, but very little.
Brian Schaefer: If you could explain the subtitle of the book, which is, I will read, Choreographer of the Modern.
Lynn Garafola: Okay. I use the term the modern. Because I didn't want to say modern dance, because modern dance have, has a very particular meaning. I didn't want to say modernism, because that again, limits what she does. Because even though I describe something like Les Noces or Les Biches, which are works of the 1920s, she evolved over time. She began to work in much more virtuosic directions, she began to value perhaps greater fluidity than the more mechanistic aspects that you see in the earlier ones, perhaps something without the irony of the, of a more modernist thing. So therefore, I used that, and I wanted to emphasize the fact that she was a choreographer. La Nijinska, I went back and forth and back and forth, but in fact, this was a, a phrase that she used, that she adapted, especially in the early 1920s, to describe herself.
[Music begins, composed and performed by Jess Meeker]
Norton Owen: That's it for this episode of PillowVoices. Thank you for joining us today on behalf of Jacob's Pillow. We look forward to sharing more dance with you through the films, essays and podcasts at dance interactive dot jacobspillow.org, and of course, through live experiences during our festival and throughout the year. Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts for helping launch this podcast series. Please subscribe to PillowVoices, wherever you get your podcasts and visit us again soon, either online or on site.