The Musical Depiction in Igor Stravinsky’s Three Ballet Work: The Firebird, The Petrushka and The Rite of Spring

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

In May 1931 the ballet Sahdji premiered at the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York: with a libretto by Harlem Renaissance's Alain Locke and Richard Bruce Nugent, music by composer William Grant Still, the ballet by Thelma Biracree, and dedicated to the Eastman School's Howard Hanson, the work was set in Africa and performed by dancers in blackface. In 1934 the work was performed with an all-black cast in Chicago and revived in Rochester through 1950. Sahdji demonstrates that the participants shared two tenets: the desire to create high art, and the belief in African forms to achieve artistic aims. Locke and Nugent had a small shared world that included Lincoln Kirstein. Locke wrote about The Rite of Spring, and Sahdji became Locke's African answer to Spring. Sahdji begs for a reinvigoration of dance history that credits philosophical underpinnings of the American ballet to the Harlem Renaissance and its queer connections.

This chapter considers two contemporary versions of The Rite of Spring: Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Jérôme Bel’s self-titled production. Because there is relatively extensive documentation of Nijinsky’s original choreography for the Rite, so-called reconstructions are widely known and available. But Le Roy and Bel seek to reimagine the ballet completely. Le Roy loosely “conducts” the score as it is piped out of speakers placed among the audience, thus inverting the traditional spatial and artistic dimensions of theatrical space. Bel drastically denudes his Rite, with naked dancers, a nearly bare stage, and a flimsy monophonic rendition of the gargantuan score. He embarks on a subcutaneous exploration of a dance performance to discover its most basic constituent parts. In reworking the ballet’s “original” materials, these artists expose some basic assumptions about music and dance as media, both as performance acts and as objects of study.

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He achieved international renown as the star of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes Company between 1909 and 1916. A dancing prodigy, Nijinsky was lauded as the best male dancer of his generation. From 1912 onwards, his choreographic modernism inaugurated the use of simpler movement language that de-emphasized virtuosity with L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Afternoon of a Faun, 1912), Jeux (1913), Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913) and the little-known Till Eulenspiegel (1916), created during the company’s second North American tour. Nijinsky refocused attention on the choreographer as the author of dance, which had great influence on how dance as an art form was understood and discussed after World War I. Because Nijinsky was institutionalized for mental illness in 1919, none of his choreographies survived intact and were, for decades, considered artistically irrelevant. This attitude began to change in the late 1980s, when new research and reconstructions of Nijinsky’s choreographies helped scholars and audiences to rethink his place in dance history, and his works are now considered to be important examples of modernism as well as precursors to both contemporary ballet and contemporary dance, more generally.

The chapter explores primitivism, African creation myths, and an analysis of Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring and Vernon Lee’s Satan the Waster in the context of Cunard’s poetic aesthetic. Marcus also contrasts Edith Sitwell’s anti-war Wheels anthology and Cunard’s engagement with African cultures and artifacts with Eliot’s primitivism. Additionally, the chapter investigates the visual primitivism of World War I and representations of the slaughter by William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis.