Adolf de Meyer. Photograph of Lubov Tchernicheva and Vaslav Nijinsky in L'Apres-midi d'un Faune, Paris, 1911.Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Valentine Hugo. Pastel drawing of Jeux, undated. Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912), with music by Debussy and designs by Bakst, was unexpected. Choreography by star male dancers had traditionally been filled with virtuosity. Faune was earth-bound, with a stylized movement vocabulary based on weight.

Jeux (1913), also with Debussy and Bakst, was one of the first ballets to mix pedestrian movements with ballet to present a modern-day theme. It seems almost startlingly up-to-date in six performance photographs and in two vivid pastels by Valentine Hugo.

Le Sacre du Printemps (1913), to music by Stravinsky and décor by Nicholas Roerich, is generally considered a seminal work not only in dance, but in cultural history. Although there are few photographs of the few performances, the near riot at the premiere is famous. The collaborators mixed modernist with ancient Russian to create a work that shocked in plot, movement vocabulary, harmony, rhythm and palette. See it for yourself in the screening area. Watch the Joffrey Ballet’s reconstruction and imagine yourself in 1913 Paris. Would you applaud? Would you riot?

Karl Struss. Vaslav Nijinsky in Till Eulenspiegel, New York, 1916. Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Till Eulenspiegel (1916) was created for the American tour. It was a collaboration with the young American designer/architect Robert Edmond Jones, set to a symphonic poem by Richard Strauss. Till is a middle European folk hero who disrupts his town until he is condemned to death, and, like Petrouchka, defies it. Nijinsky and Jones created a distorted medieval world of grotesque beggars and aristocratic women dwarfed by their costumes.