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Reconstructing the Rite of Spring
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14473 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1988 |
2,066 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 succ? 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-si?le 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 d?or, 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
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