The Rite of Spring

[ecosophia]

A couple of nights ago I ended up watching a YouTube version of the Joffrey Ballet's 1987 performance of The Rite of Spring -- the first one since the ballet first premiered that presented it as it was originally designed, choreographed, and produced. (Why was I watching The Rite of Spring? Long story, having to do with a novel I've got in process.)

It was enormously controversial when it first appeared. There was a bona fide riot in the audience on the opening night -- forty people had to be expelled from the theater, some in hysterics -- and the choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, went stark staring crazy afterwards and spent the rest of his life in an asylum gazing blankly at the wall. If this reminds any of my readers of the fictional play The King in Yellow, well, let's just say the similarity has been noticed. (Yes, that was a central part of why I was watching it; Brecken Kendall, the aspiring young retro-Baroque composer who's the viewpoint character of the novel in question, is writing a chamber opera based on The King in Yellow...) 

So I watched it.  Yes, I know, I don't usually spend time staring at jerky little colored shapes on glass screens, but I make exceptions at long intervals and this was one of them. 

Now here's the thing: I don't get ballet or modern dance. It's not that I don't like them; it's that they communicate nothing to me. Watching a ballet, for me, is like listening to a lecture in Swahili or trying to read a newspaper in Tagalog; it's clear to me that there's something going on that communicates to other people, but I don't speak the language. As a child I went dutifully to The Nutcracker over the winter holidays and took in several other ballets -- the district where I went to school used to take busloads of kids to the Seattle Center a couple of times a year to take in a play or a ballet or some other bit of culture -- so it's not a matter of unfamiliarity; whatever one is supposed to get from watching ballet dancers dance, I don't. I'd assumed for years that some aspect of my Aspergers syndrome left me with the equivalent of tone-deafness to dance performance. 

And then I watched The Rite of Spring, and it actually made sense to me. I opened up that Tagalog newspaper and all of a sudden was looking at a page in a language I could read. Not only that, it was a potent and moving aesthetic experience. 

I really have no idea what to make of this, other than to wonder what it says about me that the only dance performance that's ever made sense to me is one that put its choreographer in an insane asylum and caused a cultured and tolerant Parisian audience to go into total meltdown...

Comments

Dance as advertising?

[(Anonymous)]

I read, somewhere, that there was at least some version of public dance performance which was basically a front for prostitution. Lower-class men hired prostitutes; upper-class men patronized the ballet (and enjoyed the company of a dancer or two, in a somewhat less transactional way). From what I've been hearing lately about powerful men behaving badly in the arts and media world, it may still be going on... but no one told the women that they'd have to perform off-stage as well as on-stage.

So, if you're not interested in the product, maybe it's appropriate that you don't enjoy the ads, and you don't nod and smile to follow the crowd. You and me, both.

DE Lathechuck

Re: Dance as advertising?

[ecosophia]

Hmm. You're right that I'm not in the market for the product, but that angle hadn't occurred to me.

Re: Dance as advertising?

[(Anonymous)]

citation needed?

http://www.theweeklings.com/cbuchanan/2013/07/01/flowers-of-the-gutter-ballet-companies-as-brothels-from-paris-to-russia/

A quote: ... Anastasia Volochkova, former soloist with the Bolshoi Ballet, has in recent months accused the Bolshoi Theater’s general director, Anatoly Iksanov, of turning the famed ballet company into a “giant brothel” where dancers as young as thirteen were expected to have sex with sponsors. She first made the claim on a Russian TV talk show and then repeated the assertion to the Russian media. “It mainly happened with the corps de ballet but also,” she said, “with the soloists.”
...