very strong dancer, and danced very athletically for a lady, and had a big jump," commented Frederic Franklin, a dancer and ballet master. "She had incredible endurance, and seemed never to be tired," recalled Anatole Vilzak, who was a principal dancer in many of her mature choreographies. English dancer Lydia Sokolova, noting her lack of makeup, thought she appeared "a most unfeminine woman, though there was nothing particularly masculine about her character. Thin but immensely strong, she had iron muscles in her arms and legs, and her highly developed calf muscles resembled Vaslav's; she had the same way of jumping and pausing in the air." Alicia Markova, a prima ballerina absoluta of Britain, concluded that Nijinska "was a strange combination, this terrific strength, and yet there was a softness." The composer Igor Stravinsky, to whose music she created several fine choreographic works, wrote that "Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the famous dancer [is] herself an execellent dancer endowed with a profoundly artistic nature." After helping her brother Vaslav for many months in his laborious design of the 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring (music by Stravinsky), she found she'd become pregnant. She could not then take to the stage to perform the star role as the sacrificial maiden. Frustrated, Vaslav then screamed at her, "There is no one to replace you. You are the only one who can perform this dance, only you, Bronia, and no one else!" Nancy Van Norman Baer in her book on Nijinska writes, "Between 1911 and 1913, while [her brother] Nijinsky's fame continued to soar, Nijinska emerged as a strong and talented dancer." Author and critic Robert Greskovic describes a common understanding of her gifts, "Nowhere near the beauty and exemplar of her art that Pavlova and Spessivtseva were, Bronislava Nijinska (1891–1972) instead began to make her mark as a choreographer." Nonetheless Nijinska must have truly excelled as a dancer. When only a young student, her prowess on the dance floor had been recognized by top professionals. "If Marius Petipa patted her approvingly on the head and Enrico Cecchetti placed her, at age eight, front and center in his class between two prima ballerinas, she must have been good." Yet before the Great War of 1914 her brother's legendary dance skills had overshadowed her own. Years later, however, the editor of The Dancing Times wrote of her at a 1921 Ballets Russes performance of The Sleeping