A lonely eminence: in the past, women were not encouraged to be creative artists.

Who were the women choreographers of the 20th century who laid the foundation for our current choreographers? Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Mary Wigman, Katherine Dunham, Anna Sokolow. But wait a minute--they were all in modern dance. Who were the choreographers in 20th-century classical ballet? Well, I suppose Ninette de Valois, Agnes de Mille, just possibly Birgit Cullberg, Janine Charrat, and Andree Howard, and--if she counts as classical--Twyla Tharp. But the one whom many would call the greatest of the 20th-century female classicists is Bronislava Nijinska. And all on the strength of two ballets, Les Noces and Les Biches, which American audiences may be familiar with through recent productions by such companies as the Joffrey and Oakland Ballet, and Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Before discussing Nijinska and her lonely eminence, let's talk about women artists over the past couple of centuries in more general terms.

In her gentle but illuminating manifesto on the female artist, A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes the plight of Shakespeare's fictional sister and the way her worthy literary aspirations led to nowhere but a distinctly shabby suicide. Until the past century, it was almost impossible for women artists to break through that jockstrap ceiling. We in dance can take satisfaction in that women, at least in modern dance, became feminist standard bearers, by both pioneering an art form and becoming its creative leaders.

Nevertheless, as Woolf well understood, women were not encouraged to be creative artists. Where are the painters, apart from the odd Mary Cassatt and Artemisia Gentileschi? Where are the writers? There's the poet Sappho, of course, the weird Bronte sisters. Even George Eliot and Georges Sand had to change their first monikers to be acceptable to the literary world.

This is the unpromising backdrop to the surprising career of Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972). She started with one enormous advantage, however: She was the sister of Vaslav Nijinsky--a dancer of genius, a choreographer of edgy brilliance, a man of celebrity, but essentially an outsider. The family was of Polish descent, and both of their parents had been dancers. Like her elder brother, Bronislava studied at the Maryinsky School in St. Petersburg, and like him eventually passed, although with far less fanfare, into the Imperial Ballet (now the Kirov), and eventually followed him into Diaghilev's company.

Her career as a choreographer seemed to be prompted at least as much by chance as by any burning ambition. After all--and here is where that Virginia Woolf syndrome kicks in--why should she have any ambition for a metier in which there was virtually no female role model? She did however, have the example of her brother, and there is no doubt that she assisted him in his radical ideas on movement and music. When Nijinsky broke with Diaghilev in 1913, Nijinska also left, returning to Russia the following year. She spent the war and the Russian Revolution there, and it was around then that she started her own choreography. Her first real work was Tabakerka (The Snuff Box) in 1915 at The People's House in Petrograd. In 1919 she opened a ballet school in Kiev (one of her pupils was Serge Lifar), and in 1921 she rejoined Diaghilev.

For Nijinska the timing was precisely right. Choreographer Leonide Massine had just left the Ballets Russes and Diaghilev was looking for a replacement. He took a chance on Nijinska; she proved an inspired bet. For it was in the following years that she created her two masterpieces: Les Noces (1923) and Les Biches (1924). The first, with its feel for pagan Russia--almost the ethnohistorical follow-up to her brother's reading of that earlier Stravinsky score Le Sacre du Printemps--together with its architectural and expressionist formations, even now remains startling in its stark simplicity. Les Biches, in contrast, was a light-fingered Cocteau-style cocktail, sweetly smart in its ingredients, yet tartly naughty in its ambiguity.

During the 1928-29 season, she choreographed two notable works for Ida Rubinstein's company: the original production of Stravinsky's Le Baiser de la Fee and a version of Ravel's La Valse. Her later ballets from her American years (in 1938 she opened a school in Los Angeles) were of less interest. Typical was her 1944 Brahms Variations for the first de Cuevas company, which I recall as a large-canvas plotless work of more craftsmanship than inspiration.

But her career had a worthy coda. Frederick Ashton, who had been much influenced by her in his days with Rubinstein, brought her back to The Royal Ballet to stage Les Biches in 1964 and Les Noces two years later. And there they still seem locked in the repertoire as living testimony to her greatness.

Senior Consulting Editor Clive Barnes also covers dance and theater for the New York Post.