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Reconstructing the Rite of Spring: After 75 Years a Masterwork Lives Again
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14473 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
2,068 Words |
| Author
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Iro Tembeck
Iro Tembeck is a choreographer and professor of dance
history at the University of Quebec at Montreal. |
The 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes provoked an instant riot among the fashionable audience. The clamor and hissing of the audience from the first notes of the overture grew so tumultuous that choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky was forced to stand in the wings and shout out the uneven counts of the music to his dancers.
Although Le Sacre was immediately judged a succès de scandale, it was to be performed only eight times after its momentous opening night before it was dropped from the repertoire. Nijinsky's original choreography was thought to have been lost forever.
In the seventy-five years since its first performance, Le Sacre has fascinated successive generations of choreographers. Stravinsky's commissioned score, with its primitive, raw, and discordant violence, is considered a seminal work in the history of modern music. This explains, in part, its undeniable popularity even today, despite the fact that we are nearing the threshold of a new century with a very different fin de siècle mentality. Why is it then that Le Sacre is still viewed as relevant in the 1980s? What is the explanation of its enduring fascination for artists?
If Stravinsky's music heralded the era of modern music, Nijinsky's avant-garde choreography can be said to match the experimental quality of the music. With the privilege of hindsight, we can safely say that as spectacle--including décor, musical composition, and choreography--Sacre was a birth cry ushering in the age of modernism. Curiously enough, Nijinsky is primarily remembered in the history of dance as a dancer. As a choreographer he created one or two controversial pieces. Choosing to champion gestural innovation over classical technique, he created prototypes of what would later be known as the modernist sensibility. An entire myth has been built around Nijinsky's "lost" choreography for Le Sacre, primarily because of the scandal of the opening night. Without being able to view the actual work itself, it was difficult for dance historians and critics to assess the range of experimentation and the degree of originality in the choreography. Last November the Joffrey Ballet presented a reconstruction--not a revival--of this "lost" ballet in New York, basing it on eight years of meticulous research by dance scholar Millicent Hodson. She pieced together fragmented evidence from the promptbook score of Marie Rambert--then rehearsal mistress of the original Nijinsky production--as well as from Stravinsky's own annotated musical score. There were also several other sources: a few extant photographs, constume sketches
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