Bronislava Nijinska's Les Biches

Excerpt from La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, 688 pp., April 2022.

No sooner had Nijinska arrived in Monte Carlo than she started work on Les Biches—“The Does” is one translation—her most important Diaghilev-era creation after Les Noces and one that remains in repertory. The music was by Francis Poulenc, a member of the “Les Six,” the group of young French composers taken up by Jean Cocteau after the war and championed in Cock and Harlequin, a manifesto of the new music published in 1918.[1] Diaghilev was strongly influenced by Cocteau’s theories and, according to Darius Milhaud, another “Les Six” composer, was “distinctly attracted by the amusingly direct art personified by Poulenc and Auric.”[2] In May 1921, after hearing Poulenc’s music for
Le Gendarme Incompris, a play by Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet, Diaghilev commissioned the composer to write a ballet score for him.[3] “Mon cher ami,” Diaghilev wrote from London the following November:

As I told you, this ballet interests me a great deal, and the details you give me about it seem very amusing. . .

Before the Christmas holidays I hope to come to Paris, and I will be very curious to see and hear what you have done.[4]

More than two years would elapse before Poulenc’s ballet became a reality. In the meantime, he became a Ballets Russes insider. In 1922, he went to see Mavra at the Paris Opéra and was one of the work’s few enthusiasts. He attended the Karsavina Gala at the Théâtre Mogador, going on to a “gay” supper at the Princesse de Polignac’s with Picasso, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev, and after the revival of Chout, reported to Milhaud that Nijinska was “very good” as the Buffoon.[5] Years later Poulenc memorialized the impresario: “Dear, irreplaceable Diaghilev, you were the wonder of my 20-year-old self, not only because you gave me your confidence and esteem, but because I owe to you my most violent aesthetic shocks.”[6]

Once the Mogador season was over, Diaghilev, Poulenc, and Nijinska went to see “Mother Bongard,” Poulenc’s nickname for the well-known fashion designer Germaine Bongard, the ballet’s librettist who was to design the costumes as well. They talked for two hours, and not even Diaghilev’s fabled powers of persuasion convinced her to let them use her libretto while dropping her designs for the costumes. “She kept everything,” the composer told Milhaud.  “Perhaps we will do a suite of dances without a libretto.”[7] A few days later they visited the painter Marie Laurencin, who agreed to do the sets and costumes. Poulenc would later say that Diaghilev “betrothed” him to Laurencin, as he coupled so many composers and visual artists, whose likenesses and maquettes dominated the season’s “Programme Officiel.”[8] Les Biches, Poulenc declared, is “absolutely Marie Laurencin.”[9] In the days following their meeting a crucial decision was made. “There will be no subject,” Poulenc reported to Stravinsky, “but simply dances and songs. I am delighted by this decision.”[10] Nijinska must have been as well. Indeed, after the Bongard libretto was abandoned, she must have argued vigorously against replacing it, although Poulenc’s support was probably crucial in getting Diaghilev to agree to the idea. For Nijinska, Les Biches was a “pure dance” work, a descendant of those first plotless ballets she had choreographed in Kyiv, and a progenitor, with Les Noces, of a long series of choreographic abstractions.

As Les Biches took shape, Poulenc kept his friends abreast of its progress. To Milhaud, in August, “Les Biches will be a very clear, solid, and classical ballet.”[11] To Charles Koechlin, in September, “I am working hard on my ballet Les Biches, which I’m passionate about.”[12] He sent a full report to Diaghilev later that month. He had finished the Introduction, the song for three men, the solo for the star (“very dansante and andantino”), and the Rag-Mazurka. “Tell Nijinska that from now on she can think in terms of frenetic movements in three tempi.”[13] By January 1923, Diaghilev had scheduled Les Biches along with Auric’s Les Fâcheux and an untitled Satie ballet (never realized) to premiere the following December in Monte Carlo.[14] Holed up in Nazelles in the Loire Valley where he was staying with friends, the composer made a flying visit to Paris in June to see Les Noces, which he called “immense” and “brilliant,” then retreated to his family’s country home in Nogent-sur-Marne to finish Les Biches.[15] “Excuse my silence,” he wrote to Milhaud at the end of July:

but I work the whole day on Biches, which I am finishing. I . . . have finally found the “Chanson dansée,” which is a sort of game in the middle of the ballet. It is leaping, fierce, and charming. Marie has started the set. She has made an adorable costume for the star dancer—a short dress, very sweeping, very low-cut, in grey-white tulle, covered with rose moire panels, a pancake hat with aigrettes of the same color.[16]

By early August, the score was finished. Overjoyed that Diaghilev liked it, Poulenc asked him to have his secretary Boris Kochno write or telephone “the exact date of Nijinska’s arrival in Paris,” so he could meet her.[17] Back in Nazelles, he orchestrated the ballet. “Cher Ansermet,” he wrote to the conductor Ernest Ansermet in October:

A thousand excuses for my silence. . . I am in the thick of orchestrating Les Biches. It’s a big score: 27 minutes of very rapid music. Diaghilev is happy. I think it is good. In any case I put my heart in it and whatever skill I have. . . I am orchestrating from the manuscript and the Russians have the only copy.[18]

It was this copy that Nijinska used when she began staging Les Biches at the end of October in Monte Carlo. By early November the composer was there, recording changes in red ink on the score. The number of men went from four to three, and instead of two there were now four women soloists. The idea of inserting a solo for Lubov Tchernicheva in the Rondeau was dropped, and the setting was changed: in the score it “represented a forest in summer,” closer to the rustic settings of eighteenth-century fêtes galantes than to Laurencin’s fashionable salon.[19]

According to Boris Kochno, Diaghilev had feared that Nijinska might be “unresponsive to the Latin charm” of Poulenc’s score. However, once he got to Monte Carlo, he was pleasantly surprised. As he wrote to Kochno:

Here everything is going along much better than I had expected. Poulenc is enthusiastic about Bronia’s choreography, and they get along excellently together. The choreography has delighted and astonished me. But then, this good woman, intemperate and antisocial as she is, does belong to the Nijinsky family.[20]

As for Poulenc, he was thrilled. “The choreography of Les Biches is. . . ravishing,” he wrote to Milhaud.[21] To the composer Henri Sauguet he was even more enthusiastic. “The choreography of Les Biches is a masterpiece. It’s ravishing from beginning to end and everything that I wanted.”[22] Writing to Diaghilev in December, he could barely contain his excitement about Nijinska’s solo for Vera Nemchinova as the Girl in Blue (whom Poulenc calls the “Star”) and her choreography for the blue sofa:

Highness, you cannot imagine what you have missed for the last two days. When Nemchinova’s dance is finished—and what a marvel—they start the game. I must say that as madness it surpasses anything one could imagine. Nijinska is a genius. Listen to this: having decided that the sofa is a “star,” just as she herself is, she is making it dance throughout the game!!! Grigoriev asked the Casino for the loan of a magnificent sofa, and they fell to work (in an entirely proper fashion, naturally).

I shan’t try to describe to you what happens. In a “presto” movement, the women take sitting positions, leap into the air, fall onto the tufted cushions, roll over on their backs (although the two men are straddling the sofa back), and then they drag the poor sofa. . . in all directions. When, in the middle section, the music calms down, the Star and Vilzak bounce onstage. Thereupon the Girls turn the sofa (its back is now to the audience) into an observatory, their heads popping up over the back and then dropping out of sight; when the game resumes. . . the two men quickly turn the sofa around, and there are the two women lying down in a position that, thinking of Barbette, I can only describe as head-to-tail. . . At rehearsals, I laugh until I cry.[23]

Portrait-postcard inscribed by Francis Poulenc to Nijinska with
"deep affection," 1923. Bronislava Nijinska Collection, Library of Congress.

Poulenc was not alone in admiring Nijinska’s choreographic fecundity during these pressured weeks. “Nijinska was completely in her element,” remembered Lydia Sokolova:

She improvised and invented steps and dances at such speed that the girls found it impossible to follow her; demonstrations and explanations would develop into an uproar. Silence would then be called for, and the whole thing would begin again. The ballet seemed to take shape overnight.[24]

With “at least 72 rehearsals or close to 250 hours of work” (as Poulenc calculated), it was hardly overnight.[25] But the atmosphere in the studio was electric. During rehearsals for the pas de deux, “all the dancers insisted on watching,” he told Kochno, a sure sign of their admiration for the choreography.[26] Poulenc turned out to be a real flirt, charming the “girls” while having a fling with one of the “boys.”[27]

Unsurprisingly, a gay sensibility infuses Les Biches. As Christopher Moore notes, “Poulenc’s use of a network of rhetorical and stylistic devices that simultaneously conceal and creatively exploit the secret of his sexual identity reflects the composer’s profound engagement with the queer cultural practices of camp.”[28] Camp aesthetics, he notes, are evident throughout the ballet, but “cross-dressing, androgyny, and same-sex desire are most apparent in three of the ballet’s central scenes: the Woman [Girl] in Blue’s ‘Adagietto,’ the Hostess’s ‘Rag-Mazurka,’ and the ‘Petite chanson dansée’ featuring two young women.”[29] In the opening “Rondeau” a dozen women in salmon-pink flapper dresses slink stylishly on pointe in a salon that Claude Rostand described as halfway between “the Casino and the brothel” and Robert Brussel as “the lobby of a fashion house.”[30] Their perambulations are interrupted in the “Chanson dansée” by three brawny athletes in shorts who flex their muscles and display their physiques, a dance, Diaghilev thought, that had “come out extremely well.” The dancers—Anatole Wilzak, Leon Woizikovsky, and Nicolas Kremnev—“perform it with bravura,” Diaghilev added, “weightily, like three cannon.”[31]

Then, the Garçonne appears. Danced by Vera Nemchinova, she was a chic and equivocal figure, a “bachelor girl” and the androgynous center of the ballet’s queer universe. Poulenc told a Monegasque journalist before the premiere that the women in Les Biches were modern women, “used to Rolls-Royces and pearl necklaces from Cartier” and “pulsating” with “the rhythm of modern life.”[32] Moore sees the Garçonne as a camp figure, a man in drag who dons pointe shoes and white gloves. Her costume, a fitted blue tunic over briefs that left her legs fully exposed (albeit covered in sleek white tights), was “practically identical,” he suggests, to the costume for the Poet in Les Sylphides.[33] She appeared and disappeared, drifting across the stage on pointe, oblivious to all but a powerful magnet for the lead athlete, who follows her off. Louis Schneider called her a gandin, a dandy but with the “look of an androgyne.”[34] To a dancer who performed the role in the 1960s, Nijinska explained that she was like an “envelope, her exterior neatly folded to contain the information within.”[35] Critic André Levinson alone resisted her enigmatic appeal. He found her solo laughable and launched into a tirade against the choreography. Never one to mince words when it came to Nijinska, he declared that a “true spirit of perversity. . . seems to inspire the ballet mistress. She dissects the classical steps with the will of a torturer.”[36]

After a playful game of hide-and-seek for two of the “Biches” and the two unattached athletes, the Hostess appears. This was Nijinska’s own role, and it was a tour-de-force of petit allegro—brisés, entrechats-quatre, and beats galore—men’s steps, repeated over and over, but performed in heeled slippers (all the other women were in pointe shoes). Brandishing a cigarette holder and wearing long ropes of Chanel pearls over a dropped-waist cocktail dress, she reminded some critics of a minor American music-hall diva.[37] She actually mounted the role on a young soloist, Ninette de Valois, the founding director of the company that became Britain’s Royal Ballet. Nijinska “plucked” her from the corps and told her that she had to be ready to “show” it so the choreographer could work on it for herself. Those long evenings spent in the rehearsal room,” de Valois recalled many years later, “after the day corps de ballet rehearsals—are not easily forgotten.”[38]

Nijinska was “irresistible” in the Rag-Mazurka, Sokolova remembered. She danced with two of the men:

which gave an extraordinary picture of a spoilt, capricious woman carrying on a sophisticated flirtation. She flew round the stage, performing amazing contortions of her body, beating her feet, sliding backwards and forwards, screwing her face into an affected grimace, enticing the men and flinging herself in an abandoned attitude onto the sofa. She danced as the mood took her and was brilliant.[39]

Musically, according to Moore, the “Rag-Mazurka” is “as confused about its genre as the Hostess seems to be about her gender.” The dotted rhythms may “conjure up the worlds of both mazurka and rag, [but] neither dance is. . . musically maintained.” Moreover, the dance abounds in “quirky mixed time signatures,” as if the composer “took particular pleasure in queering the Hostess’s beat.”[40] In fact, this was the section with the greatest number of musical changes on the score, with many cuts and additions to the bass line, although at the start Poulenc writes that “The whole dance must be very rhythmic.” In the pages that follow contemporary allusions abound. A woman “slowly turns. . . like a mannequin modeling dresses,” while “shimmy of the legs on pointe” and “little movement of the shoulders, body almost immobile” suggest the choreography’s playful relationship with social dances of the day.[41]

The Garçonne and the lead athlete return for the Andantino, a pas de deux in which they go through the motions of balletic love as expressed in the developpés and supported turns of the typical Petipa adagio—but barely exchange a look. As Poulenc explained to Claude Rostand in the 1950s, “In Les Biches, it’s not a question of love but of pleasure. That’s why the Adagietto has to be performed without romantic pathos. In this ballet, one does not love for life; one goes to bed!”[42] The “Petite chanson dansée” that follows adds yet another layer of gender ambiguity, a dance for “two inseparable friends” — Sokolova and Lubov Tchernicheva in the original cast — that the composer considered “very secretly Proustian.”[43] Sokolova disliked the dance; she thought it was “wrongly conceived and badly constructed” and that Nijinska couldn’t have “understood the type of women we were meant to be.”[44]

But Diaghilev was sager in this regard. “Don’t worry,” he told Poulenc. “She will guess without understanding,” referring to the dance’s Proustian echoes. Nijinska’s rendering was “inspired,” Poulenc wrote in 1946, “for she understood its intention without really analyzing it,” or as he put it elsewhere, it was a “genius full of unconsciousness that made so much audacity possible.” She was also, he said, “an extraordinarily pure being.”[45] This is an odd statement. To be sure, Nijinska slept with men rather than women, but her relationship with Nicholas Singaevsky, her future husband, was as yet unblessed by wedlock. She had been the “man” of her family for years, and in Kyiv, certainly, had enjoyed close friendships with women some of which had an erotic component. As for Diaghilev’s immediate circle, how could she not be aware of the ebb and flow of its sexual currents? Her brother had been Diaghilev’s lover and, before him, Prince Lvov’s. She knew choreographer Léonide Massine’s story, and she was now grooming Diaghilev’s latest love interest, Anton Dolin, who had joined the company in November 1923, for leading roles and stardom.[46] She was intimate enough with Diaghilev to enjoy his occasional confidences. Late one evening, after a long day of rehearsals, he invited her to have a drink at the Café de Paris, and later they walked and talked until two or three in the morning. “During this time,” she wrote, in an unpublished reminiscence:

He talked not only about ballet but also about his personal feelings: how unhappy he was that he could not have his own son and how dear to him were Vaslav and Massine. He loved them like his own sons, and what joy it was to rear them as artists and how proud he was of their. . . successes.[47]

It’s easy to say that Poulenc and Laurencin, a prominent figure in the 1920s Sapphic world, had “queered” Les Biches because of their sexuality. But one can also view the ballet’s female figures as projections and critiques of Nijinska’s own gendered self — the vulnerable young woman she had been (Girls in Grey), the powerful, “masculine” woman she had become (Hostess), and the romantic ballerina figure she couldn’t or refused to be but continued to find appealing (Garçonne). This was not the first time that Nijinska had spotlighted these figures. The Bride and her friends in Les Noces belong to the same family as the Girls in Grey just as the Fox in Le Renard is a cousin of the Hostess and Nijinska’s transformed “Finger” variation in The Sleeping Princess a forerunner of the Garçonne. Poulenc’s music allowed Nijinska to “queer” the allure of familiar balletic roles while giving her the space to complicate— and enlarge — her repertory of gendered selves.

Les Biches premiered on 6 January 1924. It was a “triumph,” Poulenc wrote to the pianist Paul Collaer. There were eight curtain calls, something rare in Monte Carlo. “I must confess,” he wrote, “that Nijinska’s choreography was of such beauty that even the old Englishwoman with a passion for roulette couldn’t resist it. It was truly the dance itself.”[48]