biography
pronunciation:
[nizhinskee]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1890–1950)
|
| biography:
| Ballet dancer, born in Kiev, Ukraine, the brother of Bronislava Nijinska. Considered one of the greatest and most innovative male dancers of the 20th-c, he was, like his sister, trained at the Imperial Ballet School in St Petersburg, and first appeared in ballet at the Mariinski Theatre. As the leading dancer in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, taken to Paris in 1909, he became phenomenally successful, and in 1911 he appeared as Petrouchka (the Russian harlequin) in the first performance of Stravinsky's burlesque ballet. His choreographic portfolio is slim but has two high points, L'Après-midi d'un faune (1912, Afternoon of a Fawn), and Sacre du printemps (1913, The Rite of Spring), which at the time was regarded as outrageous in its subversion of conventional ballet and its use of Stravinsky's rhythmically complex score. He married in 1913, and was interned in Hungary during the early part of World War 1. He rejoined Diaghilev for a world tour, but retired in 1917 when he was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. He died in London and is buried in the cemetery of Sacré Coeur in Paris. |
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