\n<\/em><\/p>\n
![\"Compagnie](\"http:\/\/seattletimes.com\/ABPub\/2013\/01\/16\/2020148757.jpg\")
In Paris, it started a riot.<\/p>\n
In London, where it played a week or two later, the dance was dismissed by one critic as having \u201clittle or no regard for the lines of beauty,\u201d while the score was derided as having \u201cno relation to music at all as most of us understand the word.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u201d was \u201cThe Rite of Spring,\u201d which the Ballets Russes premiered on May 29, 1913, with choreography by dance legend Vaslav Nijinsky set to an Igor Stravinsky score that\u2019s now universally recognized as a modernist masterpiece.
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\nThis week, Canada\u2019s Compagnie Marie Chouinard brings its 1993 version of \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d to the UW World Series at Meany Hall. Judging from clips posted on the World Series\u2019 website, this \u201cRite,\u201d with its partial nudity and animalistic movement, may still offend genteel dance lovers. But for anyone thrilled by Stravinsky\u2019s \u201cRite,\u201d Chouinard\u2019s production promises to be a visceral experience.<\/p>\n
When Chouinard\u2019s company brought its version of \u201cOrpheus and Eurydice\u201d to On the Boards in 2008, a Seattle Times reviewer praised the troupe\u2019s \u201castonishing language of energized, tormented beauty,\u201d calling it \u201cprimordial and futuristic both.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sounds like a perfect fit for \u201cRite.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meany Hall director Michelle Witt identifies Chouinard\u2019s \u201cRite\u201d as \u201cone of the major iconic interpretations of this piece.\u201d Another, she says, is Pina Bausch\u2019s.<\/p>\n
This \u201cRite\u201d is the second Meany production this season to feature live local musicians accompanying dance performance. The UW Symphony Orchestra, under Jonathan Pasternack, will be playing, and in rehearsal earlier this month they made the whole hall vibrate impressively.<\/p>\n
This will mark the first time that Compagnie Marie Chouinard has performed the piece to live orchestral accompaniment. The other item on the program, \u201c24 Preludes by Chopin,\u201d has live accompaniment, too, with UW School of Music doctoral student Brooks Tran on piano.<\/p>\n
Witt worried that CMC would balk at the idea of live music accompanying both pieces, noting that Chouinard\u2019s choreography is highly complex and that crack timing is essential to it. But to her surprise and pleasure, they were up for it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were very much on board, as long as we could create enough rehearsal time for them,\u201d she says. The collaboration is a \u201cpilot project\u201d that Witt hopes to build on, connecting local musicians with visiting artists, as she did last fall when Seattle Modern Orchestra played the Arvo P\u00e4rt score for Paul Taylor Dance Company\u2019s \u201cThe Uncommitted.\u201d<\/p>\n
CMC\u2019s performance is also part of a campuswide celebration of \u201cRite,\u201d largely coordinated by Witt, including a lecture series at the Henry Art Gallery running through May, that comes at \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d from all angles.<\/p>\n
What makes this piece so special?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat really is remarkable for me,\u201d Pasternack says, \u201cis how the piece stands up after 100 years, and it still sounds new. … It\u2019s still a source of inspiration and ideas for contemporary composers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, he adds, it can be easy to miss what was revolutionary about it: \u201cWe\u2019re so familiar with this music now after 100 years that you really have to think about what Stravinsky did, with his orchestration in particular, and how he pushed all the instruments to their extremes in terms of range and in terms of possibilities of expression and sound combination and color.\u201d<\/p>\n
He cites \u201cthe magical opening with the bassoon playing in the very highest regions of its register. … This is something that audiences had never heard before \u2014 never heard the bassoon playing that high, certainly never heard a piece of orchestral music that began with a bassoon solo like this.\u201d<\/p>\n
The music\u2019s other key innovation was the irregularity and sophisticated savagery of its rhythms. For Pasternack\u2019s UW Symphony players, who may be familiar with the piece mostly through recordings, the orchestral arrangements that produce those timbres and rhythms pose a challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt sounds a lot different from what it looks like in the score,\u201d Pasternack notes, \u201cand vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Witt, who\u2019s a violinist by background and has played \u201cRite\u201d several times, knew she wanted to do something special for the centenary of the 1913 ballet. \u201cThat time period is just so critical in terms of the birth of modernism and the interdisciplinarity of the music and the visual arts and dance. It was such an important work that I wanted to be able to celebrate that time period.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all its innovation, she doesn\u2019t find it a forbidding piece. \u201cIt\u2019s so organic,\u201d she says. \u201cIt just feels really good to play it, in that it\u2019s very natural and instinctual.\u201d<\/p>\n
The music had its champions even at the time of its premiere. Indeed, one reason for the riot was that the people vociferously appalled by it and the people wanting to hear it actually came to blows.<\/p>\n
American writer-photographer Carl Van Vechten left a vivid account of it: \u201cI was sitting in a box in which I had rented one seat. Three ladies sat in front of me, one young man occupied the place behind me. He stood up during the course of the ballet to enable himself to see more clearly. The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the music.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dancer Marie Rambert \u2014 who later founded Ballet Rambert, England\u2019s oldest dance company \u2014 was performing that night. In 1972 she recalled, \u201cAt the first sounds of the music, shouts and hissing started in the audience, and it was very difficult for us on the stage to hear the music, the more so as part of the audience began to applaud in an attempt to drown out the hissing. We all desperately tried to keep time without being able to hear the rhythm clearly. In the wings Nijinsky counted the bars to guide us. Pierre Monteux conducted undeterred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anticipating trouble, Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes, had instructed everyone to keep going no matter what. For all the unsettling power of Stravinsky\u2019s music, Nijinsky\u2019s choreography was just as revolutionary \u2014 and Diaghilev had set it up to have the maximum effect by staging Michel Fokine\u2019s \u201cLes Sylphides,\u201d an homage to romantic ballet, on the first half of the program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat a clever man,\u201d says Betsy Cooper, director of the dance program at the UW, who trained under Ballets Russes dancers Alexandra Danilova and Felia Doubrov, from the Balanchine period.<\/p>\n
\u201cLes Sylphides,\u201d she explains, is \u201ckind of the quintessential ballet, with white tutus and pointe shoes and Chopin. It\u2019s all light and etherealness and poetry. And to put that in front, and then to have \u2018Rite\u2019 … I mean, talk about setting the audience up for the shock of the new!\u201d<\/p>\n
Unlike Stravinsky\u2019s masterpiece, which soon became a staple of the orchestral repertoire, Nijinsky\u2019s choreography, famously accused of being a \u201ccrime against grace,\u201d fell to the wayside after only nine performances, despite having its champions. Contemporary critic Jacques Rivi\u00e8re\u2019s 1913 essay on it, included in Robert Gottlieb\u2019s 2008 anthology \u201cReading Dance,\u201d couldn\u2019t be sharper about it. Calling it both \u201ca sociological ballet\u201d and \u201ca biological ballet,\u201d he wrote, \u201cAs soon as one ceases to confuse grace with symmetry and with arabesques, one will find it on each page of Le Sacre de Printemps<\/em>. … Grace does not signify smooth roundedness; it is not incompatible with angular design.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet when the Ballets Russes brought \u201cRite\u201d back into their repertory in 1920, it was with a new choreographic setting by L\u00e9onide Massine. Nijinsky\u2019s work was believed lost until Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer reconstructed it, resulting in a Joffrey Ballet production in 1987 (findable on YouTube).<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll never really know what the piece looked like,\u201d Cooper advises. \u201cWe think they were sort of standing pigeon-toed with these heavy capes and bear-heads and long braids and white makeup and red cheeks and these very pedestrian utilitarian costumes \u2014 the antithesis of ballet, right?\u201d<\/p>\n Folk dance was a strong influence.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re weighted and they\u2019re heavy,\u201d Cooper explains, \u201cworking in all these patterns with their backs to the audience. … It has this sort of sculptural heaviness, this mass to it, like they\u2019re made out of mud \u2014 like clay people.\u201d<\/p>\n The narrative line, concerning a pagan Russian tribe gathering to sacrifice a \u201cChosen Virgin,\u201d may have put off some viewers.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople talk about the timing of this piece,\u201d Cooper notes. \u201cIt\u2019s on the cusp of World War I, this cataclysmic event that changes the world. … I imagine that this sort of well-heeled audience, being confronted with this primal, somewhat brutal and nonindividualistic story, didn\u2019t really want to face that.\u201d<\/p>\n Those very themes, however, may be what\u2019s contributed to the ballet\u2019s longevity. Cooper guesses that as many as 100 different choreographers have created their own versions of it, including Chouinard, Bausch, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Trey McIntyre, Glen Tetley, Molissa Fenley and others.<\/p>\n \u201cBirth, death, sex, regeneration, brutality, this sense of community sacrifice, are some of the ideas that propel it forward,\u201d Cooper says. Not every choreographer, she adds, sticks to the narrative of the 1913 original. But many have, even if they treat the themes more abstractly.<\/p>\n One measure of the excitement \u201cRite\u201d inspires is that Witt herself is contemplating sitting in with UW Symphony\u2019s second violin section just so she can play it again.<\/p>\n Pasternack has his own reasons to be thrilled: \u201cIt\u2019s a very big deal. It\u2019s important for any orchestra program at a university the size of the UW to be able to experience playing for a ballet, playing for an opera. … We\u2019re basically guest artists,\u201d he says of his student orchestra, \u201cand I think they understand that that comes with a heightened level not only of prestige but also of responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Cooper, she\u2019s psyched about both the music and Chouinard: \u201cShe\u2019s a really inventive choreographer. I think it\u2019ll be visually dazzling. … I fully expect we\u2019re going to have our minds blown.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ll be performing in this! Not on stage with the dancers, but in the pit orchestra \ud83d\ude42 This post was originally published on the Seattle Times website. The article was written by Michael Upchurch on January 20, 2013. You can find the original post here. In Paris, it started a riot. In London, where it played a week or two …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Reblog: 100th birthday celebrations for \u2018The Rite of Spring\u2019 in Seattle","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1016,25,188],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Zt3y-I0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2728"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5639,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2728\/revisions\/5639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g-liu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}