What if I like Joanna Łuczkowska photos from final presentations…
*inspired by the Ogólnokształcąca Szkoła Baletowa im. Romana Turczynowicza w Warszawie
The first performance of the famous ballet The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) remains to this day the most scandalous ballet performance ever. The ballet premiered in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950) and performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The music for the ballet was composed by Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). At that time, Stravinsky was exploring the theme of pagan Russian rituals, and inspired by the paintings of the Russian artist Roerich, he composed powerful, rhythmically complex music. Nijinsky's ballet is subtitled Scenes from Pagan Russia. The ballet follows a legend from pagan (pre-Christian) Russia, which tells the story of the ritual sacrifice of a virgin who must dance to death to restore fertility to the land and regain the favor of a pagan spring deity. The performance is characterized by a collective ritual experience. This is evident in the dancers' movements, which at times fall into a trance-like state, a condition typical of transitional rites with symbolic sacrifice. The performance strongly intertwines eros and thanatos, and in the energetic performances of the dancers, one can discern rebellion, defiance, and the ritual that culminates in a sacrificial offering. The execution of the spring ritual follows the patterns of rites of passage, which are separation, transition (liminal), and reintegration. In a specific state of communitas, there is a loss of individuality, and the ritual makeup, which dominates this performance, strongly marks the separation from the everyday.
Nijinsky's ballet marked a break with the classical understanding of dance art. In his Rite of Spring, exotic subversiveness and hints of avant-garde movements come to the fore, as it shatters all the prevailing norms of staging at the time. Nijinsky makes a complete departure from traditional ballet, creating his poetic salto mortale in choreography that is anti-form, anti-ballet (Tim Scholl, From Petipa to Balanchine) with an almost Dadaistic gesture. Dadaism emphasizes the absurdity of a civilization that destroys its own values. Dadaism strives to overthrow and destroy old principles and the logic of the system, mocking "eternal beauty." These Dadaist features are particularly noticeable in the dancers' movements, who assume distorted poses, with knees turned inward, angular arm positions, and hunched torsos. The emphasis is on primitive, simple, and natural movement devoid of any artificiality, which is why it is no surprise that the performance appeared so shocking to the tastes of audiences at the time. With its frenetic and untamed rhythm, The Rite of Spring, both musically and choreographically, seems to foreshadow the impending catastrophe that would occur a year later in the form of World War I.
Nijinsky revolutionized early 20th-century ballet with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Inspired by Meyerhold's static theater, two-dimensionality, stylized postures, depersonalized manner of performance, and slow, meaningful movement, he created his own semiotic dance vocabulary (Iva Višak, PLESNA SCENA.hr, 6. prosinca 2016). Like Meyerhold, who rebelled against Stanislavski, Nijinsky rebelled against traditional ballet forms. His ballet is a provocative theatrical experiment dealing with the physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatrical setting. Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. Actors focused on learning gestures and movements as a way of physically expressing emotions. After the uneven critical reception of the initial performance, followed by a brief London tour, the ballet was not performed again until the 1920s, when Léonide Massine's choreography replaced Nijinsky's, with only eight performances. In the 1980s, Nijinsky's original choreography, long believed lost, was reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.
The ballet, after its premiere, was a notorious failure due to the audience's misunderstanding and unwillingness to accept such an avant-garde and revolutionary ballet work of the early 20th century. The significant influence this ballet had on the development of dance art is evidenced by the numerous subsequent performances of The Rite of Spring. Notable later performances include the one with Martha Graham in the role of the Chosen One (USA, Philadelphia Orchestra, and Leopold Stokowski); Lester Horton, whose version replaced the original pagan Russian setting with the Wild West and the use of Native American dances; Royal Ballet (choreography by Kenneth MacMillan, 1962); Bolshoi Ballet (Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasiliev, 1965); reconstruction of Nijinsky's 1913 choreography by the Joffrey Ballet (Los Angeles, 1987); Mariinsky Theatre (2003), Sasha Waltz (2013), Xavier Le Roy (2018). The following is a review of several notable performances of this famous ballet.
Maurice Béjart's performance (Béjart Ballet, Brussels, 1959) is characterized by minimalism in the set, animalistic movements of the dancers, and costumes and scenery in muted, earthy tones. Unlike Nijinsky's ballet, which strongly intertwines and opposes two driving forces, Béjart's approach to the spring ritual is less negative and nihilistic as it moves away from thanatos, with eros taking center stage. Consequently, this performance conveys an affirmative understanding of the ritual and sacrifice, with the sacrifice depicted only on an allegorical level. The dance takes place on multiple levels, and the neutral folkloric element is only visible in the dancers' footwork. Béjart's ballet is highly cinematic, evoking the atmosphere of 1970s films. Especially in the sections dominated by red and muted tones, the atmosphere is almost Flash Gordon-esque, as if it were taking place on Mars. Although devoid of decor and scenery, the lighting and colors also signify the recognizable interior design that dominated the 1970s. The colors are gold, orange, brown, and green, and the dancers are often caught in antique postures. In Béjart's Rite of Spring, man is portrayed as part of nature, while nature is depicted in its entirety. In the sacrifice of the virgin, erotic aspects are present. Béjart's representation replaced the culminating sacrifice with what critic Robert Johnson described as "a solemn, ceremonial coitus." Béjart's ballet frequently references the history of visual arts, especially the Renaissance and Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, which is recognizable in the female formation's dance.
Pina Bausch's The Rite of Spring (Wuppertal ballet company, 1975) is dominated by expressionist dance gestures, and the primary scenic element of this performance is the soil dust. On a stage covered in dirt, the dancers celebrate the arrival of spring and participate in rituals of celebration and competition. Men and women gather in groups, sometimes appearing hostile, sometimes gentle, until it becomes necessary to choose the one who will be sacrificed. A young woman is chosen to dance to her death. The soil dust that dominates the stage, in contact with the dancers' bodies, turns into dirt, which becomes especially visible on the women's bodies as they are dressed in light dresses that bear visible traces of the mud. The soil and the red scarf act as a bullfight, becoming an arena for the conflict between male and female principles. For Pina Bausch, the ballet is a battle of the sexes. The female dancers, dirty from the earth, at times seem like war victims of rape, a sense heightened by the sharp choreography dictated by a frantic rhythm. At the core of the performance are lust, despair, anger, discomfort, anxiety, and fear, all inscribed in the dancers' bodies (particularly evident in the postures of their arched backs). This impression is further intensified by the performers' general breathlessness, resulting from the physically demanding dance sequences, and the overwhelmingly dominant dirt from the soil dust. The dirt, which clings to the bodies, torsos, and faces, is like war paint smeared on all parts of the body (on the shoulders, feet, eyebrows, cheekbones, lips), with which Pina Bausch seems to communicate with our ancient ancestors, bringing all her primal anger into the modern world.
The Rite of Spring in the direction, choreography, and performance of French dancer and choreographer Xavier Le Roy in 2018 is set in a completely different mode. Subtitled as a performance for three performers made for theater, the performance, as Le Roy himself emphasizes, emerged from his observation of the Berlin Philharmonic during a rehearsal of Le Sacre du Printemps in 2003. Le Roy decided to work on Stravinsky's classic out of interest in conducting movements. Without musical training, Le Roy embarked on a challenging process of studying conducting interpretation as if it were his own choreography. Through research, he concluded that an inversion of cause and function opens up in conducting performances: gestures and movements that serve to prompt musicians to play appear simultaneously produced by the music they should produce. Le Roy is fascinated by the moment before and after the sound, the movement, the intention to move, and the motor skills of the performance that arise from the conducting performance. As Le Roy points out, there are as many bodies as there are different roles and perspectives in listening, and the question arises of what the musician, the conductor, or the audience hears when listening becomes part of an embodied, inevitably visceral experience of movement and sound. Due to the complex approach to Stravinsky's music, Le Roy manages to intrigue the viewer/listener in a completely new and unexpected way for this well-known work, which already emanates a conditioned experience and reaction through its performance. However, due to Le Roy's specific method of performance, in which he, dressed in a bright red shirt with gestures that at moments evoke Lecoqian, even buffoonish theater, our expectations of the emotion that the performance of The Rite of Spring should trigger are confounded. We suddenly become aware of an entirely new visceral experience, which is particularly achieved through the performance and Le Roy's incredible fluid and somewhat disturbing bodily metamorphoses.
What if ... we pose in a dancing family photo
Photo: Tena Bošnjaković
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By Irena Boćkai
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