‘Why don’t we know more of her? It’s upsetting’: dance genius Bronislava Nijinska
‘I was told that British audiences don’t really like experimental work, like they do in Germany or Switzerland,” says American choreographer Andrea Miller. “Which makes me really nervous. I’m more on the expressionist weirdo side.”
Miller, 41, is making her first work for a major British ballet company, a new version of Stravinsky’s Les Noces, originally choreographed a century ago by Bronislava Nijinska. “If I remember this correctly, Nijinska’s Les Noces did really well in Paris and then failed in London. So, there’s a precedent,” she grimaces.
In the vast production studio at the English National Ballet HQ in east London, the dancers are getting their bodies around some of that expressionist weirdo movement. In dramatic darkness, they move in a choreography of contrasts: grace and bluntness, decisive shapes and loose bodies, natural and unnatural. It’s a change from the classical ballet at ENB’s core, for sure. Miller’s language is one of “tension and
