Category: {dance}

Dance

The Rite of Spring, 2001

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Now this one is fantastic… Angelin Preljoçaj’s modern dance interpretation is wildly energetic, and, after a century of the music becoming increasingly familiar, manages to return some of the shock value to the ballet. Preljoçaj dispenses with symbolism and brings the sexual nature of the material to the fore, with recurrent instances of coercion that will no doubt prove intolerable for some viewers. All one can say to that is that this is a ballet which has always been about primitive erotic rituals which culminate in a chosen sacrifice being forced to dance herself to death. (The third part of the ballet—Jeu du rapt—was bluntly translated on a recording I used to own as “Game of Rape”.) For the finale of Preljoçaj’s version the dancer (uncredited, I’m afraid) performs naked. The televised performance benefits a great deal by having a score courtesy of Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra thundering away in stereo. It’s a thrilling piece which shows that a century on The Rite of Spring has lost none of its power when carefully staged. Kudos to Ubuweb for turning up the goods once again.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Rite of Spring, 1970
• The Rite of Spring reconstructed

The Rite of Spring, 1970

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Another film of the ballet that’s useful as a comparison to the later reconstruction. Maurice Béjart’s Ballet du XXe Siècle show how the music might be interpreted if the original ballet is pretty much discarded. The choreography is by Béjart himself, and for me creates a mixed impression. Women are wholly absent from the first half despite the ballet being about the spring rituals between groups of young men and women. In place of Nijinsky’s stamping crowd there’s a great deal of hopping around which runs the risk of looking more comical than pagan. The second half works better when the company creates a shifting arrangement of Busby Berkeley-like groupings. In place of the ceremonial sacrifice at the end we have some erotic mime which was no doubt advanced for 1970 but which packs less of a punch than the strange and terrible finale of the Joffrey performance. Where the original ballet still seems fresh, the 1970 version now appears rather dated. The whole thing is available for viewing at Ubuweb.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Rite of Spring reconstructed

The Rite of Spring reconstructed

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This week sees the centenary of the first performance by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Everyone is familiar with the details of that momentous occasion, and Stravinsky’s score is probably performed more frequently today than any of his other works. Less familiar is the nature of the ballet which caused so much outrage. A combination of the hectic schedule of the Ballets Russes and the loss of choreographer Nijinsky a few months later meant that the choreography was never properly transcribed. This caused problems for subsequent revivals, and the only reason we have an idea of the radical nature of the ballet is thanks to a decade of research by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, a pair of cultural archaeologists who’ve specialised in reviving ballets. Hodson and Archer scoured archives looking for details of Nicholas Roerich’s costumes, and also traced surviving members of the 1913 company in order to verify their choreographic researches.

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The performance here is a recording of the Joffrey Ballet’s staging of Hodson and Archer’s reconstruction from the late 1980s. I first saw this in 1989 and was aghast at how strange and savage the dancing is compared to classical ballet. Hodson and Archer have since amended some of the performance details but there’s more than enough in this staging to convey why the ballet was so threatening and disturbing to the audience in 1913. Even today, after decades of modern dance it looks surprisingly crude with its dancers stamping their way across the stage. I was also thrilled to see the restoration of Nicholas Roerich’s costumes and decor. In addition to giving the ballet its distinctive look, Roerich contributed the pagan dramaturgy, something that tends to be overlooked when so many big names are competing for attention. (There’s more about Roerich and his involvement with the Rite here.) I always enjoy the way Roerich provides a link between this favourite ballet and the writings of HP Lovecraft. I’ve no idea what Lovecraft would have made of The Rite of Spring but he had a lot of time for Roerich’s paintings, and refers to them in At the Mountains of Madness.

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The recording linked here is annoyingly split into three parts (and the soundtrack is hissy mono) but if you’ve any interest in the original ballet it really needs to be seen.

• The Rite of Spring: part one | part two | part three

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vaslav Nijinsky by Paul Iribe
• Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes
• Pamela Colman Smith’s Russian Ballet
• Le Sacre du Printemps
• Images of Nijinsky

Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers

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Poster on the left designed by Major Felten (1931).

In 1914, [Ruth] St Denis married a twenty-two-year-old gay man, the ambitious and sexually charismatic Ted Shawn (1891–1972), who became her dance partner. Shawn appeared at any opportunity in the scantiest of costumes. In 1915, they founded the Denishawn Dance School in Los Angeles, which became a significant artistic center from which many creative dancers emerged, most notably Martha Graham.

Burton Mumaw (b. 1912), a student of Shawn’s, first danced with the Denishawn company in 1931. Mumaw and Shawn soon became lovers and life companions. Shawn separated from St. Denis in 1933 and formed his Company of Male Dancers. Mumaw and Shawn were the leading soloists of the new company. (more)

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of GLBTQ’s claims about Ted Shawn’s sexuality before he married Ruth St Denis, but it’s impossible to see his all-male dance troupe as anything other than homoerotic, especially when they had a tendency to perform in the nude (see below). Shawn’s intention was to move the associations of male dance away from the perceived effeminacies of ballet towards something more assertive and muscular. Shawn and Ruth St Denis had gone to great lengths to import into American dance various exotic elements from Asia and the ancient world, a process they called “Oriental dance”. This was no doubt the kind of Orientalism which is repudiated today for its appropriations but in the 1910s and 20s these developments were significant moves away from the staid traditions of 19th-century ballet. Shawn continued this evolution with a robust choreography based on ethnic war dances and other masculine fare. This kind of all-male dance is now very common—and remains homoerotic, of course, often intentionally so—but in the 1930s the idea was a radical one.

YouTube has a short film of Shawn and company in action in 1935. At the Internet Archive there are the two volumes of Ted Shawn’s Ruth St. Denis, Pioneer & Prophet: Being a History of Her Cycle of Oriental Dances (1920).

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