Bronislava Nijinska was the sister who made her famous brother Vaslav look ordinary. A choreographic genius who rewrote ballet's rigid language, she demanded that women be more than delicate ornaments on stage and built dances that treated the female body as a source of power rather than decoration. Born in Minsk on January 8, 1891, into a family of Polish dancers, Nijinska trained at the Imperial Theatre School in St. Petersburg alongside her brother. She joined the Ballets Russes and danced under Michel Fokine before turning to choreography. When Vaslav Nijinsky's mental illness ended his career, Bronislava carried the family's artistic ambitions forward. Her 1923 ballet Les Noces, set to Stravinsky's score, depicted a Russian peasant wedding as a ritual of collective force. The dancers moved in geometric blocks, stamping and driving across the stage. There was nothing decorative about it. The piece was radical: it stripped ballet of its romantic prettiness and replaced it with angular, percussive movement that owed as much to Constructivist art as to classical technique. It premiered in Paris and stunned audiences who expected traditional grace. She choreographed Les Biches in 1924, a witty commentary on sexual ambiguity set in a 1920s house party. Le Train Bleu, also in 1924, featured sets by Henri Laurens, a curtain by Picasso, and costumes by Coco Chanel. She was at the center of Parisian modernism, collaborating with its leading figures while raising two children largely alone after separating from her husband. She left the Ballets Russes in the late 1920s and spent decades working across Europe, South America, and eventually the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles and ran a dance school. Her choreography was revived by major companies in the 1960s and 1970s, long after she'd been marginalized. She died on February 21, 1972, at 81, having proved that the most important Nijinsky was not the one everyone remembered.