Sayette, 87, has a long history with Nijinska, and is one of the very few who are authorized to stage her work. He has staged “Les Noces” multiple times over the years for ensembles as diverse as the Mariinsky Ballet and the students of SUNY Purchase. In 1969, when he was a member of the Ballet Center of Buffalo, he danced in Nijinska’s “Brahms Variations” under her direction. (The ballet is no longer performed, and Sayette doesn’t remember the choreography.) “She was very deaf,” he said, “and would kind of pound out the rhythms with her fist on your chest.”
In 2009, Sayette staged another Nijinska work, “Les Biches,” for Sklute and Ballet West. A cutting satire of 1920s bright young things that includes a killer solo for a woman, full of jumps and bends for the upper body, “Les Biches” seems to come from a different world than “Les Noces.” And yet they share an unconventional view of the dancing female body, a freer, more sculptural deployment of the torso and arms, and a powerful and percussive use of dancing on pointe.
“What Nijinska discovered,” Garafola said, “is that pointe work could be reincorporated into ballet in a way that made it strange and different.” In “Les Noces,” that pointe work is often done with the feet in parallel position, rather than turned out from the body’s center, as is typical in ballet. It gives the movement a plainer, almost mechanical look. That look is echoed by Natalia Goncharova’s basic, workmanlike costumes and set, which Ballet West uses in its revival.
Nijinska’s portrayals of gender, an essential part of her choreographic imagination, might have stemmed, in part, from her dancing. She was both a strong technician and a jumper (like her brother) and tended to shy away from the glamorized ideal of the ballerina. At times she even took on male roles. “I am not a ballerina,” she once told Diaghilev. This meant, Garafola said, that she did not identify with “this figure at the top of the ballet hierarchy that was all about female beauty as defined by the constraints and ideals of ballet.”
