The Rite Riot: The Ballets Russes and The Rite of Spring

By Linda Besant

On May 9, 1909, dancers who would come to be known as Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes gave their first performance at the Théatre du Chatelet in Paris. By the time the company dissolved upon Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the “Russian Ballet” had given work to Europe’s best dancers, choreographers, composers and artists, revitalized ballet throughout the Western world, and amassed an astonishing avant garde repertoire.

Diaghilev himself was an impresario. He created through others, bringing together artists of all disciplines to produce integrated, revolutionary works of art. “A list of his collaborators,” wrote Arnold Haskell, “reads like an index to the cultural history of the first three decades of the century.” The list encompasses composers such as Debussy, Prokofiev and Ravel; choreographers from Fokine to Nijinsky and Balanchine; and artists like Picasso, Matisse and Dali.


Le Sacre du Printemps, known in English as The Rite of Spring, was the landmark work of the Ballets Russes season in 1913. Composer Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich, the painter and amateur archeologist who designed the scenery, set forth an ancient tale of the ritual sacrifice of a chosen maiden to the spring gods of fertility.
Stravinsky had composed Firebird for Diaghilev in 1910, and Petrushka in 1911, but he broke all bounds with Le Sacre du Printemps. “I tried,” he said, to evoke “the mystery and surge of the creative power of spring . . . like the whole earth cracking.” Lydia Sokolova, who danced in the first production, wrote, “To express the dread, hope and frenzy of these brutish folk, Stravinsky made a music whose rhythms, trembling, pulsing, flickering, thudding and crashing with a maniac piston beat, registered their animal emotions.”

Diaghilev assigned Le Sacre du Printemps to his favored choreographer for the 1913 season, Vaslav Nijinsky, the 24-year-old classical dancer worshipped across the continent for his magnetic presence and sensational jumps. Nijinsky had created L’Apres-midi d’un faune, the scandalous success of the Ballets Russes 1912 season, a dreamlike and erotic meditation that bore no resemblance to classical ballet. With Sacre, Nijinsky ran even further from ballet’s balance and symmetry. “Really,” he said, “I begin to have horror of the very word ‘grace’; ‘grace’ and ‘charm’ make me feel seasick . . . my own inclinations are ‘Primitive’.

Here's a clip from The Joffrey Ballet's recreation of the original 1913 choreography:



As the video above shows, Nijinsky’s choreography was raw and weighted to the earth. “The dancers trembled, shook, shivered, stamped; jumped crudely and ferociously, circled the stage in wild khorovods,” wrote Lynn Garafola. It took 120 rehearsals for the dancers to encompass the utterly foreign demands of Nijinsky’s movement and Stravinsky’s polyrhythms. “The girls used to be running round with little bits of paper in their hands, in a panic, quarrelling with each other about whose count was right and whose wrong,” Sokolova remembered.

The public response to Le Sacre du Printemps “was exactly what I wanted,” Diaghilev told Stravinsky after the premiere on May 29, 1913—the audience at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées rioted. Valentine Gross, who was present that night, described the melee: “The theatre seemed to be shaken by an earthquake. It seemed to shudder. People shouted insults, howled and whistled, drowning the music. There was slapping and even punching.” Stravinsky escaped backstage, where Nijinsky was screaming counts wildly from the wings. Conductor Pierre Monteux continued the performance as if nothing were happening. Years later, Stravinsky wrote about Sacre, “A method is replaced; a tradition is carried forward to produce something new.”

Critical response at the time ranged from “epileptic fits, absurd dancing,” to “oddly impressive.” One paper defended the artists’ right to experiment. Looking back, historian Lynn Garafola wrote that in Sacre, Nijinsky showed “that ballet could generate styles of expression as powerfully imagined, deeply personal, and vitally contemporary as those of the other arts.” For the rest of its existence, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes continued to generate forward-thinking ballets, circling back to its roots in 1928 with George Balanchine’s newly classical Apollo.
Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre du printemps was reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer in the 1980s for the Joffrey Ballet. Since 1913, choreographers across the spectrum of dance have created more than 60 interpretations of Stravinsky’s score, serving as a potent symbol of Diaghilev’s legacy.

More posts about The Stravinsky Project | Buy Tickets to The Stravinsky Project

Notes:

Dancing for Diaghilev: The memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, ed. Richard Buckle. John
Murray Publishers, 1960. p. 42

Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Lynn Garafola. Oxford University Press, 1989. pgs. 68-75
International Dictionary of Ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, Jody Leader. St. James Press, 1993. pgs 1231-1233

Nijinsky, Richard Buckle. Simon and Schuster, 1971. p. 300

Nijinsky: God of the Dance, Derek Parker. Equation, 1988. pgs 143-147

wikipedia

LOOKING BACK AT THE FIRST FIREBIRD

by OBT Historian Linda Besant

The original Firebird premiered in 1910 for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. For nearly twenty years, from 1909 to 1929, Diaghilev’s company of primarily Russian-trained dancers performed radical new ballets that gave equal expression to all the arts involved.

Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were among the greatest fruits of an extraordinary era. Historian Nina Lederman described “a great diaspora of intellectuals” to Paris in the early 1900s. A “generous portion of the world’s great artists” swirled through, and Diaghilev showered them with opportunities to collaborate in creating exciting dance, productions called ballets that actually had more in common with what we now term “modern dance.”



(For example, the original Firebird princesses danced in bare feet and Ivan walked naturally, not like a danseur noble; the Firebird herself did not use turnout, and Kachei’s monsters cavorted with grotesque jumps and squats.)

Firebird was among the first creations of the Ballets Russes. Michel Fokine was Diaghilev’s chosen choreographer during this period, but Stravinsky was Diaghilev’s second choice to compose Firebird. (First choice Liadov did not deliver in time.) Stravinsky was paid 100 rubles for the score, about the price of a Diet Coke in St. Petersburg these days.

Stravinsky and Fokine worked closely together on the ballet, weaving together elements from several Russian folk tales into a story with old symbols but a new outcome—total liberation from evil. Fokine described their process, improvising and refining toward the finished score and choreography:

“Stravinsky visited me with his first sketches and basic ideas, he played them for me, I demonstrated the scenes to him . . . When Ivan appears at the garden wall . . .
Stravinsky played, and I interpreted the role . . . substituting the piano for the wall.
I climbed over it, jumped down from it, and crawled, fear-struck, looking around my living room . . . Stravinsky, watching, accompanied me with patches of the melodies . . .
playing mysterious tremolos as background.”

For his part, in the autobiography Chronicles of My Life, Stravinsky wrote how his musical ideas “worked themselves loose” by improvisation at the piano. He likened improvising composers to a restless animals—“they feel the desire to seek for something.”

Of his choreography for Firebird, Fokine wrote,

“I completely excluded the stereotyped hand pantomime and ballet gesticulations for the development of the plot on the stage and expressed the story with actions and dance.”

Monsters crawled and rolled rather than advancing in symmetrical lines; the Firebird twisted and fluttered to escape from Ivan. (Fokine said her “arms would now open up like wings, now hug the torso and head, in complete contradiction of all ballet arm positions.")

Firebird was told non-stop—not once did the story pause for displays of virtuoso dancing.

Tamara Karsavina danced the first Firebird. Anna Pavlova was slated for the role, but found the music incomprehensible and refused to dance it. The great Vaslav Nijinsky wanted to premiere the Firebird role en pointe, but Diaghilev did not permit it. Fokine himself was the first Ivan.

Critic John Martin wrote that the original Firebird “ . . . was a magical work in its day, unlike anything we had ever seen.”

The Ballets Russes premiered Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring in almost yearly succession between 1910 and 1913, all composed by Stravinsky. As Lederman wrote,

“They established the one-act ballet as an important new form in music theater. Stravinsky… is the age … a force of utmost immediacy that has pierced our ears, extended their range, re-formed our appetites.”

Oregon Ballet Theatre is pleased to have generated its own Firebird and The Rite of Spring with acclaimed choreographers Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Stowell. With the commission of Nicolo Fonte to create a new Petrouchka for OBT’s 2011-12 season, the company will complete an historic trilogy.

More posts about The Stravinsky Project | Buy Tickets to The Stravinsky Project

Notes:

Stravinsky in the Theatre, Ed. Nina Lederman. Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949.
Lecture: Stravinsky’s Firebird, Joni Steshko. Portland State University, 2003.
Fokine: memoirs of a ballet master, Michel Fokine. Trans. Vitale Fokine. 1969
Stravinsky, Frank Onnen. Continental Books Company, Stockholm, 1958.
Dance Classics: A Viewers Guide to the Best-Loved Ballets and Modern Dances, Nancy
Reynolds and Susan Reimer-Torn, a capella books, 1991.
Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Boris Kochno. Harper and Row, 1970.