Remaking the Wedding: Bronislava Nijinska’s 'Les Noces' and the Politics of Revival

• In Event: The Transfer and Reconfiguration of Memory through Music

Abstract

Bronislava Nijinska’s choreographic works in the 1920s exemplify the whirlwind of creativity, talent, and stylistic pluralism that pervaded Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the time. Of this period, Les Noces represents modernism and jarring juxtaposition: classical against unconventional, warm against stony, joy against anguish, peasantry and urbanity, French and Russian. While crucial contradictions in the 1920s are flattened in these revivals, new pressing questions emerge as the work-become-artifact is set against a backdrop of late-twentieth century politics.

Author

• Jamie Blake, Capital U