Reconstructing the Rite of Spring: After 75 Years a Masterwork Lives Again

Article # :	14473
Section :	THE ARTS
Issue Date :	3 / 1988	2,068 Words
Author :	Iro Tembeck
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�s 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�cle 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�cor, 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 by set designer Nicholas Roerich, and drawings by artist Valentine Gross, who had been in the audience. Such painstaking scholarly work, put together from meager visual, verbal, and literary sources, represented a phenomenal endeavor comparable to an archaeological excavation. When this "re(w)rite of Spring" premiered last November, the world was finally able to witness a reconstructed masterpiece and judge Nijinsky's impact as a choreographer. By returning to the source, tracing and hence recreating the original myth and mystical aura surrounding Sacre, all subsequent versions created by other choreographers had to be examined in light of this rediscovered prototype. Nijinsky had intuitively responded to Stravinsky's music, matching its power and primitive quality by using discordant lines, ... Read Full Article