Hodson

The IU Bloomington alumnus will be speaking Tuesday, Oct. 28, on "Nijinsky Rediscovered" and Thursday, Oct. 30, on "Balanchine as a Beginner: From Petrograd to Paris." Both lectures will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Auditorium 015.

Best known for her research and pioneering reconstruction of the 1913 Vaslav Nijinsky choreography for the infamous Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, Hodson’s co-partner in the reconstruction was her husband, designer and art historian Kenneth Archer, the leading expert on the work of Nicholas Roerich, who designed the first production of Sacre.

In her first Patten lecture, Hodson will discuss reconstructing the "lost" choreographies of Nijinsky, the star dancer of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Hodson’s second lecture, "Balanchine as a Beginner: From the Petrograd Avant-Garde to the Ballets Russes in Paris," will focus on 20th-century master choreographer George Balanchine. Both lectures will include video excerpts from reconstructions by Hodson and Archer.

Hodson's and Archer's reconstruction was produced by the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, revised (Chicago, 2001) and has had a significant number of productions since, including the Paris Opera Ballet (1991), the Finnish National Ballet (1994), Companhia Nacional de Mailado, Lisbon (1994), the Zurich Ballet (1995), the Ballet of the Theatro Municipal, Rio (1996), the Rome Opera Ballet (2001). Last April, the Kirov Ballet performed the work as part of the 300th anniversary of the City of St. Petersburg.

Further reconstructions of "lost ballets" by Hodson and Archer have included the Nijinsky choreographies for Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and Claude Debussy's Jeux, and several early ballets of Ballanchine (Cotillian, La Chatte and Le Chant du Rossignol).

Hodson completed her undergraduate work at IUB and received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Ford Foundation Fellow. She devised an interdisciplinary program in cinema and spectacle focusing on the Ballet Russes and movement aesthetics in modern Russian art. Although she had previously trained in ballet and modern dance, and had danced in New York and San Francisco, it was during her Berkeley years that she realized it was Nijinsky's creative method she wanted to learn.

For each of the ballets Hodson has created or reconstructed with Archer, she has made many drawings that serve as both a means of discovery and a means of documentation.

Her book, Nijinsky's Crime Against Grace: Reconstruction Score of the Original Choreography for’ Le Sacre du Printemps’ (Pendragon Press, 1998) has become a standard reference for dancers, artists and musicologists. A companion volume, Jeux, is being released this year, also by Pendragon Press.