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.