Describes how Russian dancer-turned-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky broke free from ballet conventions in his pre-war productions for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), Jeux (1913) and, most famously, The Rite of Spring (1913). Focuses on his characteristically reductive movement vocabulary, the arrangement of dancers on stage and his retreat from the traditions of illusionistic theatre as recognized and understood at the end of the long nineteenth century. Considers various source materials, including press reports, photographs, choreographic notation (where available) and oral testimony. Also explores possible influencing factors within the pre-war theatrical scene (modernist puppet theatre, two-dimensionality, the so-called ‘cinema of attractions’), as well as influences Nijinsky may have had on the choreographers who followed him.

Begins by considering the visual discrepancy between the earliest photographs of the dancers from the original production of The Rite of Spring (taken by Charles Gerschel) and the sketches made by art student Valentine Gross during rehearsals and first performances: a discrepancy between a dissonant, harsh geometry and an art-nouveau-inspired, impressionistic beauty. Explores how this disjunction reflects a broader cultural anxiety of the period – as apparent in some of the first press reviews of the ballet – about dancing bodies, an aesthetics of ugliness and the grotesque. Describes how Nijinsky’s choreography and its obvious bodily deformity evoked parallels with the avant-garde practices of Futurism, Cubism and primitivism, as well as with a lineage of established ballet traditions (character dance and grotesque ballet). A final section explains how Nijinsky managed to re-frame his dancers on stage so that they could invert the power dynamics of the standard Orientalist gaze.