Since the premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1913, scores of choreographic works to the celebrated Stravinsky music have seen the light of day. In 1987, when Joan Acocella and I compiled a list of as many productions as we could document for the Dance Critics Association symposium “The Rite of Spring at Seventy-Five,” the number was forty-four.1 (Of course, that was in the Dark Ages before Google and the Internet!) By the time we republished the list in Ballet Review in 1992, it had climbed to seventy-five, including more than twenty earlier versions we had missed.2 Since then the numbers have grown exponentially. In 1999 the Italian critic Ada d’Adamo counted ninety-three versions.3 Three years later, “Stravinsky the Global Dancer,” the database developed by Stephanie Jordan and her colleague Larraine Nicholas at Roehampton University in 2002, recorded 181 settings of the score, with roughly half since 1990 and with several choreographers staging multiple versions.4 After a brief slackening, the numbers spiked again in 2013, with countless new productions and revivals of old ones marking The Rite’s centenary. Seemingly the idea of the now-legendary work coupled with its memorable score posed an irresistible challenge.
Even as the productions keep coming, like Vaslav Nijinsky’s original they keep disappearing, with perhaps two dozen or so in active repertory. To be sure, few dance works outlive the first decade of their creation. They may leave traces, documentary and otherwise, but as living works they enter the limbo of non-performance, where they languish long after any hope of retrievability has gone. Yet The Rite of Spring, despite the absence of a definitive theatrical text, continues to occupy cultural space. In the introduction to her book The Archive and the Repertoire, performance scholar Diana Taylor muses: “Is performance that which disappears, or that which persists, transmitted through a nonarchival system of transfer that I . . . call the repertoire?” In other words, is the cultural relevance of The Rite of Spring linked to what Taylor calls “the paradoxical omnipresence of the disappeared”?5 Or, to put it a little differently, does the cycle of loss and renewal built into the very identity of the ballet inspire its continuous reinvention? Is the very absence of a fixed, stable, or permanent choreographic text what accounts for the ballet’s staying power? If so, what ideologies and impulses do these Rites seem to espouse, what conventions do they reject, and why have they retained their imaginative force?
In this essay I argue that The Rite of Spring, precisely because it is a lost ballet, comprises a body of ideas rather than a detailed choreographic script and that this conceptual freedom allows both for the ballet’s continual reinvention and for the persistence of ideas associated with the original. One group of ideas centers on the ballet’s transgressiveness—its primitivism, violence, modernity, and repudiation of traditional ballet aesthetics—all underscored by the “riot” that took place at the premiere. From this perspective The Rite is a model of formal radicalism, a dance that says “no” to the status quo and hints at freedoms beyond the stage. At the same time, The Rite belongs to ballet’s canon. It was produced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, an heir to the nineteenth-century Franco-Russian tradition and the progenitor of its twentieth-century descendants. It was produced on a grand scale, and its central conceit—the death of the maiden—has a long ballet history. Finally, it was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, the company’s celebrity danseur and Diaghilev’s lover, whose career was cut short by mental illness, a tragedy that memorialized him as a mad genius. From the first, The Rite proclaimed its centrality to ballet history, even as it rejected the conventions of the past and exuded a whiff of scandal.
Since 1913, choreographers have approached The Rite from numerous vantage points. Some have emphasized its violence; others its sexuality, primitivism, and terror. Many have thrown out the original scenario and some even most of the score (Akram Khan uses only thirty seconds of it); nearly all have discarded the original ethnographic trimmings. Although most productions stress the ensemble, there have been a few heroic solo versions. Initially, ballet choreographers, albeit those identified as modernists, created the versions that followed Nijinsky’s Rite. Subsequently, most of the work’s choreographers have been associated with modern dance. But whatever the choreographer’s aesthetic position, The Rite continues to be a work that insists upon its modernity, its engagement with the contemporary world. For, ultimately, what each new version seeks to resurrect is the ballet’s original transgressive moment, its modernist persona, both as an act of resistance and as a means of claiming membership in a performance tradition that defies the ephemeral nature of dance through continual reinvention.
In Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra,” Richard Taruskin analyzes the music of The Rite of Spring in terms of the distinction drawn by the poet Alexander Blok between kul'tura, or culture, and stikhiia, the elemental force that sprang from the people.6 Kul'tura was rootless, artificial, and inauthentic, an expression of the elite, whereas stikhiia encompassed the life and culture of the contemporary Russian peasant. Writing in the first decade of the twentieth century, Blok urged artists to renounce culture and emulate those who still practiced the ancient rituals and performed the ancient dances. He dreamed of wholeness, of a reconciliation with the earth, of union with nature. For Stravinsky as a composer, kul'tura signified any number of things, from musical folklorism to nineteenth-century art music and the German symphonic tradition, with its ideas of musical structure, harmonic progression, and thematic development.7 Stikhiia, by contrast, embraced the uncouth, elemental, and unmediated. It was closely associated with Scythianism, a term applied to artworks thought to embody—and here I quote Taruskin again—the “elemental and maximalistic rendering of primitive antiquity in a shockingly coarse and brutal manner.”8 In Stravinsky’s score it was associated with peasant ceremonial songs (many of great antiquity); the radical transformation that rendered them almost invisible, a formal simplification so extreme it appeared to deny all refinement of thought and feeling; and the complexity and even violence of the composer’s rhythmic innovations.9
Neither Nijinsky nor his sister Bronislava Nijinska, for whom the role of the Chosen Maiden was originally created and who later wrote about the ballet in her memoirs, ever referred to The Rite of Spring in terms of kul'tura and stikhiia. Yet the tension between the two haunts virtually every aspect of the ballet’s staging, from its movement vocabulary and rhythmic dynamics to its spatial configurations, performance style, narrative approach, and costumes. That tension is played out in the choreography or architecture of the work and in the bodies of the dancers who brought it to life, one of many universes they inhabited in the course of a single season. Like classical music, ballet was an imported art in Russia and, as such, a prime example of kul'tura, even if many of the earliest dancers were serfs. It arrived in the early eighteenth century following Peter the Great’s “reforms,” and from the start it was identified with the West. Ballet masters, who typically combined the functions of choreographer, teacher, and performer, traveled from Italy and France, bringing stars and repertory, along with composers and “machinists” to create both sound environments and spectacular effects. By the nineteenth century the schools attached to the Moscow and St. Petersburg companies were among the finest in Europe, although the talent and repertory, with very few exceptions, continued to flow from West to East, and few ballets featured any Russian content, however anodyne. Russianness lay in the bodies of the dancers and in the political economy of a system of state support that all but insulated the Imperial Theaters from both the economic marketplace and the intrusion of contemporary ideas.
Although the dancers may have been Russian, their technique belonged to the West. Ballet had its origins in the courts of Renaissance Italy and acquired both an identity and a nomenclature in the France of Louis XIV. Ballet technique impersonated the pose and stance of aristocracy, even when the performers ceased to be “noble amateurs” and came instead from clans of dancing and music masters and from the fairgrounds. Turnout (the outward rotation of the hips), symmetry, and a codified series of foot and arm positions were the building blocks of the new technique, which by the eighteenth century had developed a vocabulary of virtuosic jumps and “beaten” steps. Pointework, which emerged in the 1820s to become a badge of ballerina identity, opened other areas of virtuosity while identifying ballet aesthetics with femininity. In no other European theatrical practice were women so dominant onstage as in ballet or was the social status of the practice itself so compromised because of the visibility of women. Men were notable for their absence, except in certain highly prescribed “masculine” roles. Such roles were seldom classical ones, and they were rarely expressive.
With twenty-four men, The Rite of Spring was not the first injection of testosterone onto the twentieth-century French ballet stage.10 The Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor, performed on the very first Ballets Russes program in 1909, had already intoxicated audiences with the “fever and madness” of its choreography and the “savage exultation” of its warriors.11 Nijinsky, too, in ballets such as Schéhérazade and Le spectre de la rose, thrilled audiences, albeit as a new kind of male hero, the virtuoso androgyne. Mikhail Fokin (or Michel Fokine, as he styled himself in the West), whose works dominated the Ballets Russes repertory up to World War I, had already rejected many conventions of nineteenth-century Russian ballet—its multiact structure, codified pas de deux, jumble of dance styles, and mime. He took his women out of tutus, tights, and pointe shoes and dressed them in sandals, soft slippers, and tunics so that they became simultaneously antique, exotic, and icons of contemporary fashion. The body under the tunic, uncorseted for the first time in a hundred years, extended itself in space, arching and curving with a new expressive freedom. Fokine created the same liberating magic for men.
The Rite, in contrast, rejected both the West and the feminine as they were embodied in ballet. The Art Nouveau curve of Fokine’s expressive body vanished in a geometry of line and angle, even as Nijinsky abandoned the technique of the danse d’école—the academic dance—in which he had been trained. Turnout was the foundation of that technique; it made possible the nineteenth-century acrobatic feats at which he excelled but that modernists decried. As a choreographer, however, Nijinsky rejected turnout. In L’après-midi d’un faune (1912), his first ballet, he conceived all the movement in parallel; in The Rite he explored the widespread use of the turned-in, pigeon-toed position he adopted as the native stance of his pre-Slavonic tribe, just as turnout was that of the art identified with Russia’s Westernized elite. Nijinsky also eliminated ballet’s graceful, codified arm gestures and the French-named step vocabulary developed over two centuries, instead basing his movement on a highly stylized combination of folk and vernacular gestures, hardened and masculinized. His dancers stamped and shook, trembled and fell, rushed and fought, circled and killed. “By breaking up movement and bringing it back to the simple gesture,” wrote Jacques Rivière in La nouvelle revue française, “Nijinsky caused expression to return to the dance.”12 The virtuosity lay in the complex rhythms, the unfamiliar movement, the precision, stamina, and impersonal performance style called for by the choreography and the unconventional pathways that electrified the stage space—far from the neat symmetries of the nineteenth-century ballet stage or even the orgiastic dynamism of Fokine’s works. No wonder a modern-dance choreographer such as Senta Driver could baldly assert in the introduction to a volume about William Forsythe that “the real founder of modern dance was Vaslav Nijinsky.”13
The idea of Nijinsky’s Rite as exemplifying what later generations would call “modern” or “contemporary” dance (among other terms) has become a critical part of the ballet’s “memory.” The Rite was a ballet that dispensed with ballet technique. Even if the dancers carried that technique in their bodies as a result of their daily practice and the repertory they performed on a regular basis or even on the same program, as was the case of Nijinsky’s dancers (at its premiere The Rite was preceded by Les sylphides, a Neoromantic reverie, and followed by Le spectre de la rose and The Polovtsian Dances), Nijinsky’s choreography for The Rite obscured the danse d’école.14 This was also obscured to a degree by the character of the Diaghilev company itself. Most of Nijinsky’s dancers were young, and few were seasoned performers. Only a minority was certifiably Russian, and of these only a handful had danced at the Imperial Theaters.15 They thus embodied a form of ballet practice that diverged sharply from what prevailed on the imperial stage. Of all the dancers who took part in The Rite of Spring, none, including Maria Piltz (who performed the role of the Chosen Maiden because Nijinska was pregnant), was a technical virtuoso in the conventional sense.
Caught up in the experimental ferment that preceded and followed the Russian Revolution, the Rite choreographers who immediately followed Nijinsky widened the breach with imperial practice. Their work, which horrified conservative critics such as Akim Volynsky and André Levinson, was honed in artists’ cabarets, studios, or dramatic theaters or, in Léonide Massine’s case, in Diaghilev’s traveling “laboratory” during World War I. They cast their Chosen Maidens from outside the ballerina tribe and used both ballet and modern dancers in the ensemble. In her analysis of German Rites from the early 1930s to the 1990s, the dance scholar Susan Manning argues that choreographers staged the work “during periods of heightened tension between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ styles on the German dance stage.”16 Since Millicent Hodson’s re-creation of Nijinsky’s “original” in 1987, with its subsequent revivals for major ballet companies, television broadcasts, and commercial release on DVD, the number of new productions by ballet choreographers has declined sharply, while the number by self-described “contemporary” or modern choreographers has shot up.17 Even more so than earlier in the century, choreographing The Rite implied a stance of corporeal and cultural nonconformity.
Massine’s Chosen Maidens of the 1920s and early 1930s—Lydia Sokolova, Bronislava Nijinska, and Martha Graham—emphasized how “unclassical” he considered the role, even when casting classically trained dancers. To be sure, both Sokolova and Nijinska were ballet trained, but they were better known for performing dramatic, grotesque, and character roles than for performing “classical” ones that embodied the eternal feminine. Sokolova (through her amanuensis Richard Buckle) has written at length about her encounter with the role of the Chosen Maiden, while many have commented on Graham’s clashes with the choreographer during rehearsals for the American premiere. But Nijinska has been generally overlooked.18 In part, this is because she took over the role two years after the premiere (in 1922, when Sokolova had temporarily left the Ballets Russes), and revivals were barely noted in the press. But Nijinska herself never mentioned her appearance in the part that her brother had originally conceived for her. In a 1923 season round-up for Theatre Arts Magazine, the American expatriate critic Florence Gilliam commented on the anger this “supremely intelligent” artist brought to the role of the Chosen Maiden, the “terrible macabre intensity” and “spasmodic, hysterical terror” she conveyed as the victim of an “inevitable fate.”19
Whose choreography was Nijinska dancing? Was it Nijinsky’s, filtered through the sister on whose body he had initially molded the role? Was it Massine’s, filtered through Nijinska’s own sensibility as a choreographer? Or was it some combination thereof? And why Nijinska’s silence? Did she feel that she had betrayed her brother by dancing the version that had supplanted his original? Or did she feel that she had usurped his identity as a choreographer? In 1922 she danced not only the Chosen Maiden but also her brother’s role in L’après-midi d’un faune, the very role he had sketched on her more than a decade before in the family’s St. Petersburg parlor.20 Now, with her brother incurably ill, she was revealing in a very public way her role in the genesis of his most important productions. Was she doing this at Diaghilev’s behest? Or was she doing it on her own, now that she enjoyed Diaghilev’s artistic confidence?21 She never said.
As Taruskin has pointed out, human sacrifice did not figure among the rituals of the pagan Slavs.22 In ballet, however, nineteenth-century heroines died with regularity, abandoning terrestrial existence to enter, as André Levinson put it, the “enchanted country” of “the ideal.”23 The Chosen Maiden never enters this enchanted country. Unlike Giselle or Nikia in La bayadère, she never dons a tutu or slips on pointe shoes to experience the redeeming afterlife of the ballet blanc, the solace of a sisterhood, or the bathos of sentimental heartbreak. Caught in a vise she cannot escape, she has only her pain. This pain, built into the original scenario, is gendered and also heroic. She may be condemned to die, but she does not acquiesce in her fate; unlike the nineteenth-century ballerina, the Chosen Maiden articulates her pain and registers a protest. As Levinson wrote of Maria Piltz in her dance of death, “A sudden spasm shook her body. . . . At the fierce onward thrust of the rhythm, she trembled in ecstatic, irregular jerks. This primitive hysteria . . . completely caught and overwhelmed the spectator.”24
These silent screams of protest have become part of the ballet’s memory. They suggest why so many women who are identified with the modern movement in dance have been drawn to The Rite and why the sacrificial theme has survived in so many productions. Pain haunts Mary Wigman’s Rite of Spring and Martha Graham’s, and Molissa Fenley’s States of Darkness, the marathon solo of a survivor. But more than any other production, it is Pina Bausch’s Rite, conceived in the early days of second-wave feminism, that generalizes the pain: it is shared by the work’s entire female community and highlighted from the beginning. Women dominate Bausch’s Rite; the lyrical sections, starting with the introduction, belong to them, young women vulnerable and tender—a ballet sisterhood, although they are barefoot and dressed in slips. In the strongly rhythmic sections, they abandon their ballet selves; no longer silent, they express their pain in a paroxysm of self-flagellation, repeatedly striking their pelvises and wombs—gestures reiterated by the Chosen Maiden in her final solo—as waves of men invade the stage in a succession of attempted rapes. In Bausch’s work the rival tribes of Stravinsky’s scenario are men and women.
The first generation of choreographers of The Rite of Spring were Russians, and they carried the ballet’s Scythian vision to different corners of the operatic world—Boris Romanov to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (1932), Léonide Massine to the Metropolitan Opera (1930) and La Scala (1948), and Lasar Galpern to the Cologne Opera House (1930). From the start, then, the Russianness of The Rite was linked to alterity, to the primitive other nestling in the heart of Russia’s divided soul. Over the decades this cultural specificity was lost, and Scythians gave way to Aztecs (Gloria Contreras), Native Americans (Lester Horton), Australian Aborigines (Stephen Page), Japanese samurai (Mats Ek), and a host of cultural “others” who identified barbarism and the primitive in more generic ways and who were set in communities—rural and urban—torn by violence, AIDS, ethnic cleansing, ritualized gang rape, human destruction of all kinds, and even nuclear holocaust. Again, the story that emerges from “Stravinsky the Global Dancer” is instructive. Just as the movement idiom employed by choreographers has grown increasingly diverse, encompassing not only modern dance and ballet but also physical theater elements and world dance forms such as butoh (Min Tanaka), salsa (Emanuel Gat), and traditional African dance (Heddy Maalem), reflecting the increasing globalization of dance, so, too, The Rite has become a work that comments on the contemporary world. Its physical settings and its people, free of the protective cover of the past and the embellishments of exoticism, belong to the here and now, while the treatment of barbarism is more often exemplified by the multiple forms of violence—urban, sexual, political, cultural, ethnic—that permeate today’s world. In Martine Époque’s 1987 version for Artscène in Montreal, a pair of rebels lead an uprising against the dictator of a broken society; in Horst Müller’s Nuremberg version, the action takes place in a bunker-like space under a cloud of impending annihilation; Saburo Teshigawara’s version uses images of Nijinsky to reflect on the brutality of urban industrial society; and Anne Bogart, Bill T. Jones, and Janet Wong’s 2013 version uses a shell-shocked doughboy to invoke the horrors of World War I. In ways that Stravinsky and his collaborators could never have imagined, their dance offspring have continued to reinvent what it means to be contemporary, redefine what is understood as evil, and renew their engagement with a changing world order. The Rite encourages choreographers to seize that moral and cultural high ground.
Sexuality as a germinative force was central to the earliest manifestations of The Rite of Spring. The Chosen Maiden is sacrificed in a bargain with the gods for abundance to make the earth yield its fruits and ensure the well-being of the human tribe for another year. Here was a manifestation of Eros as understood by Freud in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a life drive that embraced survival, community, propagation, and the “enormous constructive activity” of the vital instincts.25 “One cell,” he wrote, “helps to preserve the life of the others, and the cell-community can go on living even if single cells have to perish,” a biological model that sums up the relationship of the Chosen Maiden to The Rite’s original community and that also echoes Jacques Rivière’s description of the work as a “biological ballet.”26 The life drive is closely connected with the sexual instinct, what Freud calls the libido, and this in turn “coincide[s] with the Eros of poets and philosophers, which holds together all things living.”27 This cosmic model emphasizes the social and creative functions of sexuality. It is not about the individual sexual act or individual sexual pleasure: individual agency does not enter into Freud’s scheme at all. With Maurice Béjart’s production, however, first performed at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in 1959, the sexual act came to the fore.
Béjart’s Rite of Spring was part of a post–World War II revisionist trend in ballet that witnessed the re-creation of several Diaghilev-era works, outfitted with new stories and new steps. An early example was Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun (1953), reconceived as an encounter between two dancers in a studio rather than a faun and a half dozen nymphs in an Attic grove. Then, in 1959, Béjart “undressed” The Rite of Spring, eliminating sets and ethnographically suggestive costumes and equating the primitive with sex. According to the dance historian Shelley Berg, the project was the brainchild of Maurice Huisman, the Monnaie’s director, who “wanted to present ballet as an art form capable of appealing to young people, as well as attracting an international audience.” He chose The Rite because it had once caused a “revolution.” Béjart, an outsider in a Francophone dance world dominated by the Paris Opéra, had a different idea. “I planned the meeting of a man and a woman,” he told Berg, “then the act of love as a ritual; something religious, even something very violent.”28 The ballet ended with more than forty dancers making love “to show the fundamental force that incites the race to reproduce.”29 The dancers wore leotards and tights—the women’s flesh-toned, the men’s in earth colors—that not only revealed the body but also made it a contemporary body, like the dancers in works by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Robbins. Béjart’s Rite entered the repertory on the very eve of the 1960s; it anticipated both the sexual revolution and the youth revolution and seemed to usher in the Age of Aquarius. Moreover, it was not the only Rite of that era to underscore hedonism and sexuality. Kenneth MacMillan’s version, which premiered in 1962, two years after London saw the Béjart work, again dressed the dancers in leotards, although the Australian designer Sydney Nolan, in keeping with the antipodean theme (“the landscape of . . . regions untouched as yet by civilization”), used face painting and wigs to achieve an appearance of primitivism.30 When the ballet was revived in 2008, the critic Louise Levene referred to the cast as “line-dancing zombies” and to the choreography as an “ethnic pick’n’mix of flexed feet, jutting buttocks, splayed fingers and two-footed jumps.”31 Béjart’s Rite, too, looks old hat. The animal imagery that once promised liberation now seems heavy on testosterone, while the squats, lunges, contractions, and other midcentury modern-dance movements look like clichés. Today, decades after the sexual revolution, one no longer has to “go primitive” to choreograph sex.
To a far greater degree than virtually any other dance work, The Rite of Spring is cognizant of its history. To be sure, there have been choreographers who have looked critically at that history, deconstructing it perhaps, interrupting the smooth operation of cultural memory: Yvonne Rainer and Jerôme Bel are two who come to mind.32 But for most of the choreographers who have grappled with the score and the presenters who continue to fund new productions, The Rite of Spring stands for the art form’s great tradition. A touchstone of twentieth-century culture, a certifiably great work, a work of substance made familiar by the passage of a century and made ever more accessible by technology, The Rite is a way for choreographers to interject themselves into the canon. To be sure, The Rite is a canonical work that exists in multiple lost forms and a few dozen living ones; it belongs to what might be called a canon of memory, full of echoes, traces, movements, and half-remembered ideas that survive through the palimpsests of later productions. This is the ballet’s Scythian inheritance, its challenge to kul'tura, its potential for resistance through corporeal expression, and the possibility it offers to experience anew the transgressiveness of modernism through the choreographic act. Through continuing waves of reinvention, The Rite has demonstrated not only its staying power but also a way of approaching canonicity in an art in which virtually nothing survives in performance. As Stephanie Jordan suggests, new choreographers seem to “approach their task” less by reflecting “upon a notional original, and more upon a whole history of production.”33
The musical interpretation of The Rite of Spring may vary from performance to performance and conductor to conductor, but it remains bound by the notated score. The addition of a dance element to the work alters the equation dramatically. With no standard choreographic text, the work ventures into realms the musical score alone cannot take it; it undergoes a process of reinvention that updates and transforms the work and even alters how the music is perceived. A reason—perhaps the reason—The Rite remains so vital a musical text is because it keeps remaking itself as a dance. It has a vibrant life outside the concert hall and remains a living cultural artifact, one that responds to outside stimuli, accesses multiple cultural memories, and shares them with diverse audiences. Because of the relative stability of the score, The Rite of Spring holds out the tantalizing possibility of reexperiencing the ballet’s original transgressive moment, of linking an art of the moment to a canon that transcends the individual work by encompassing both its forgotten and half-remembered predecessors and its living contemporaries. The Rite of Spring, even at 100, remains a work in progress.
1. “The Rite of Spring at Seventy-Five,” program brochure of the symposium organized by the Dance Critics Association with the Dance Collection, New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, 5–7 November 1987.
2. Acocella, Garafola, and Greene, “Rites of Spring.”
3. D’Adamo, Danzare il “Rito,” 259–75.
4. Jordan and Nicholas, “Stravinsky the Global Dancer.”
5. Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire, xvii.
6. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:850. See also Tatiana Vereshchagina’s comments on stikhiia in this volume.
7. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:956–57.
8. Ibid., 1:856.
9. Ibid., 1:959.
10. The playbill for the third performance on 4 June 1913 lists twenty-four men, including the Sage, and twenty women, including the Chosen Maiden and the Old Woman of 300 Years.
11. See, for example, Brussel, “La Saison Russe”; Claretie, “La vie à Paris”; and Beaumont, Complete Book of Ballets, 686.
12. Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps.” This quotation is from an excerpt translated by Miriam Lassman in Kirstein, Nijinsky Dancing, 166.
13. Driver, “Nijinsky’s Heir,” 1.
14. The programming for the 1913 Paris performances included Les sylphides, The Rite of Spring, Le spectre de la rose, The Polovtsian Dances (29 May); Les sylphides, The Rite of Spring, Schéhérazade (2 June); Schéhérazade, The Rite of Spring, Le spectre de la rose, The Polovtsian Dances (4 June); Les sylphides, The Rite of Spring, Thamar (6 June); and The Rite of Spring, Le spectre de la rose, La tragédie de Salomé, Carnaval (13 June).
15. The dancers whose names appear on the program for the 4 June 1913 performance of The Rite of Spring were Maria Piltz (Chosen Maiden), Liudmilla Guliuk (Old Woman of 300 Years), and Alexander Vorontzov (The Old Sage); (?) Bonetska, (?) Boni, (S) Dombrovska, Anna Broomhead (Bromney), Doris Faithfull (Doris), Jadwiga Jezierska, Hilda Munnings (Maningsova), Olga Khokhlova, (?) Konetska, Kazimiera Kopycinska, Henrietta Majcherska, Stanislava Pajewska, Zofia Pflanz, Susanna Puare, Marie Rambert, (?) Razmoumovitch, Lubov Tchernicheva, Aleksandra Wassilewska; Anatole Bourman, Mikhail Fedorov, Maximilian Froman, Alexander Gavrilov, (?) Goudine, Nikolai Ivanovsky, Leon Kanissow, Waclaw Kegler, Alexander Kotchetovsky, Stanislaw Kostecki, Lyudwik Kowalski, Nikolai Kremnev, Kazimierz Lobojko, (?) Maliguine, S. Oumansky, (?) Rachmanow, Boris Romanov, Nikolai(?) Semenov, Arkadii(?) Sergeiev, Maksymilian Statkiewicz, Franciszek Warzynski, Jan Zielinski, and Nikolai Zverev.
The spelling of names varies wildly. For the Polish dancers listed in the appendices of Pudelek’s Warszawski Balet, I have given the Polish version of their names. For Russian dancers listed in the Yearbooks of the Imperial Theaters who did not Westernize their names, I have simply transliterated the Russian name; otherwise, I have used the Western version. For names I cannot otherwise identify, I have used the name as it appears on Sergei Grigoriev’s 1909–13 company lists in bMS Thr 465, S. L. Grigoriev Papers, Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. I am grateful to Andrew Foster for identifying Susanna Puare (whose name is given as Poiré on the program) as the niece of the Russian actress Maria Puare and the Moscow-born French political cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré (Caran d’Ache).
16. Manning, “German Rites,” 130.
17. See Jordan and Nicholas, “Stravinsky the Global Dancer,” for the shift, which began in the late 1980s. It should be noted that ballet productions, especially those staged for companies with longevity, such as Britain’s Royal Ballet and the Paris Opéra Ballet, tend to stay in repertory for long periods of time.
18. The only secondary source to mention Nijinska in the role is Berg, Seven Productions, 74. In her memoirs, Sokolova recounts the single instance when Nijinska danced her role in Massine’s version of the ballet.
In Brussels [in 1928], where a big orchestra was available, Diaghilev revived Le Sacre du Printemps with Bronia Nijinska in my role as the Chosen Virgin. I expect he thought I should never dance again and that it was wise to keep the ballet fresh in the memory of the company. Bronia, of course, had the strength and the understanding for this role, but her individual type of movement was so different from Massine’s, that the dance she did was almost unrecognisable and had little in common with the rest of the ballet. With such complicated rhythms as Stravinsky’s for Le Sacre, her gift for improvisation could not see her through, and apparently she finished her dance some time before the music. She only danced it once. (Dancing for Diaghilev, 265)
The Rite of Spring was given two performances at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, both on 23 May 1928. However, the Chosen Maiden was danced not by Nijinska but by Alexandra Danilova. For a list of Ballets Russes performances during the 1920s, see Pritchard, “Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.” Programs for the Monnaie performances are in the collection of the Carina Ari Library, Stockholm.
19. Gilliam, “The Russian Ballet of 1923,” 193. The phrase “supremely intelligent” comes from an obituary of Diaghilev that Gilliam wrote for an unidentified American magazine in October 1929 (folder 1, box 23, Bronislava Nijinska Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
20. During the 1922 seasons at the Paris Opéra (18 May–3 June) and the Théâtre Mogador (17 June–1 July), L’après-midi d’un faune was given on 23, 27, and 31 May; 1, 17, 20, 23, 25, and 29 June; and 1 July. The Rite of Spring was given on 27 May and 3 June. Bronia dans le faune, a drawing by Mikhail Larionov, shows Nijinska in costume rehearsing Faune in front of Diaghilev (box 171, Bronislava Nijinska Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
21. According to the choreographer’s daughter Irina Nijinska, in conversation with the author, it was Diaghilev’s idea that Nijinska dance her brother’s role in Faune. However, it is hard to imagine her giving ten performances of the ballet in Paris and additional ones on tour if she had no interest in doing so.
22. Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 1:880.
23. Levinson, “The Spirit of the Classic Dance,” 47.
24. Levinson, “Stravinsky and the Dance,” 40. This essay was based on a 1922 review, “Les deux Sacres.”
25. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 64. Eros is not a term that Freud himself uses.
26. Ibid., 63; Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” 729. Rivière (in Lassman’s translation) continues: “One might think oneself in the presence of a drama acted out under a microscope: the history of mitosis; the profound need of the nucleus to break up and reproduce, the division at the core, the splitting and rejoining of turbulent matter that reaches into its very substance; large revolving masses of protoplasm; germ layers, zones, circles, placentas” (Kirstein, Nijinsky Dancing, 168).
27. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 64.
28. Quoted in Berg, Seven Productions, 93.
29. Ibid., 93–94.
30. “How Nolan Visualizes.”
31. Levene, “Like a Lamb to the Slaughter.”
32. Compare Gabriele Brandstetter’s discussion of the Rainer choreography in this volume.
33. Jordan, Stravinsky Dances, 416.