Here are the only photographed female dancers of the Ballet Russes’ first staging of Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps from 1913.After 4 hours of trying to tease out the real names even with Lynn Garafola and Millicent Hodson’s publications, I could not determine the actual names.  Here is the best I could do.

Julitska (nope) Zhulitska?  nope

Marie Rambert  ding!

Jadwiga Jezierska  (close enough/ semi ding!)

Boni (nope)Janina Boniecka (ding!)

Doris Faithful (ding!)

And then of course is the terrible foreshadowing of the Chosen One, Maria Plitz. 

This is the only known photograph of Maria Plitz, the first girl to dance herself to death but while people were hurling rotting vegetables at her and real Russian Pagans showed up and shot arrows at her and then the other girls laughed and didn’t include her in anything anymore.  Ok, that is a lie I think.  But they were booing and disrupting and Nijinsky was going shithouse in the wings.  Don’t believe me?

Ladies, Chosen Ones who I have championed, fought for, searched for tirelessly… Maria Plitz was your destiny.

You are all Maria Plitz.

Marjo, Susanna, Kirsi, Katja, Asta, no photos at all:
you are Maria Plitz.

Paula Passos, Renata Versiani, same:
you are Maria Plitz.

Patrizia Manieri,
you are Maria Plitz.

Heather Aagard:   you are more than that. –>

You started this whole archive project, you! And were it not for you, no one would be documented at all.

Your recollection of that one night in the circle is a poem as is Paula Passos’ and Kirsi Tiiliharju and more I am sure. 

You are the inheritance of Maria Plitz.

You should both be fucking pissed.

Yours for the price of a cocktail,

Fatova