Jill Rivers
Jill Rivers is an arts writer and facilitator who has been immersed in making arts & culture accessible for over forty years, as a journalist specialising in the arts and Media Director of The Australian Ballet. She has served on various dance boards, including as Chair of Ausdance Victoria. She is a committed speaker and has staged major events such as the Australian Dance Awards and established Public Programs - Artspeak at the (Victorian) Arts Centre, Melbourne. In 2008 she moved to Central Victoria, where she established Daylesford Macedon Ranges Open Studios and Art-full Conversations. Her book, The Arts Apothecary was published in 2017, and The Genius of Nijinsky in February 2025. She currently lives in Castlemaine, Victoria where she continues to produce Arts for Health and Good Grief events, plus research her next two books. www.art-fullliving.com
Biography
The Genius of Nijinsky
The story of Nijinsky, the Polish/Russian Dancer is a tale of brilliance and despair, of innocence and stardom, celebrity, sensitivity, and tragedy, and amongst the saddest historical cases of artistic success versus mental health. Jill Rivers was introduced to his story by filmmaker Paul Cox during the filming of the dancer’s diaries in 2001, resulting in an invitation to stay with Nijinsky’s daughter Tamara in Phoenix, Arizona. She embraced the intimacy of the opportunity to meet his family – his granddaughter Kinga and great-grandson Mark, and to explore the famous dancer’s life and its controversies. As a long-term Media Director of The Australian Ballet, she had visited the then Soviet Union with the company and was familiar with the theatres of St Petersburg, Moscow and Odesa. Her research took her to back to Russia to re-trace Nijinsky’s footsteps through the Imperial School – now the Academy of Russian Ballet – to other parts of the city connected to his life, and to Italy to meet his grandson and namesake Vaslav Markevitch. What became apparent to her was that Nijinsky was way ahead of his times – at the vanguard of Western Modernism in multiple artforms – movement, literature and art. In many ways, it was his tragedy. This book is published to celebrate The Australian Ballet season of John Neumeier’s acclaimed ballet Nijinsky. It races the origin of Russian ballet and applauds Nijinsky’s genius, a century on.
