Sweat, toil, disheveled hair, dirt, flesh. . . . This is the powerful image of the women of Pina Bausch’s Wuppertal Tanztheater bunching closely together and throwing themselves violently into the signature motive of her Rite of Spring.1 Let us call it the “bob/strike” motive:
We see this bob/strike motive eight times, introducing the “Augurs of Spring” section of Stravinsky’s score, then in variation down the stage diagonal (nine times), then turning upstage and back (four times), expanding into an eight-count version (five times), and finally again in its original form (four times). The dancers count “one, two, three, four,” at the rate of a quarter-note, crossing two bars of the musical 
meter (equivalent to eight eighth-note chords at the start of “Augurs”). At the same time, these bodies appear condemned en masse to be in the groove of exaggerated repetition, and this group dance becomes a profoundly anti-body, anti-Subject (anti–the human Subject) construction: a mass of bodies as an army or a machine.
Certainly, the idea of a machine is supported by the score and is confirmed by Pierre Boulez’s taut 1969 recording, upon which Bausch’s choreography is based.2 But perhaps the first mention of the machine in Stravinsky’s score comes from the Russian critic Viacheslav Karatygin in 1914—his review begins by invoking, for instance, motor cars and airplanes.3 Stravinsky’s dance music is rhythmically quite different from the ballet music of the past: no more the comforting buoyancy, the sense of ebb and flow; instead, the propulsion of motor rhythm with an emphatic beat pulling the body into the ground.
Bausch more than articulates the machine element that is already in the music, but perhaps more than any other Rite choreographer, she exaggerates the giant turbines at work in this score as much as she shows us the real body in action. She responds to the motor element that Richard Taruskin maintains became increasingly emphasized and streamlined (and ultimately thrilling) in Rite musical performance,4 although not in any way to sanitize a profoundly inhuman story, nor is it in her hands to remove the dangerous potential of the score. Bausch’s Rite could well be the strongest illustration of the original inhuman scenario as critic Jacques Rivière describes it.5
We have a heightened awareness of Stravinsky’s motor pulse because Bausch shows that pulse so emphatically. But she also distinguishes herself from some of the composer’s processes. For a start, she creates her own, independent dynamic accents, such as the regular strike on count 4 of the signature motive, which does not happen musically. Then, too, she emphasizes plain, regular accentuation more starkly than Stravinsky through repetition of choreographic motives (the dance equivalent of the musical ostinato). One single idea goes on for a long time, and she never actively disrupts the sense of as Stravinsky himself does. Indeed, the power of the visual rhythm is initially strong enough to settle us metrically when the music unsettles us. Perhaps, by adding a dance layer in dialogue with the music, and by taking one of Stravinsky’s principles (such as the ostinato) and pushing it further than he does, Bausch makes us hear the Rite score in a new way.
But then, in terms of agency (given the machine analogy), we might ask: Are the dancers representing the drivers or the driven, or both? How dancers feel doing this dance contributes to what they communicate to their audience. My own overriding impression from trying out some of the rhythmic moves is one of discomfort and disorientation, the head flung back and dropped forward, leading to an off-balance and blurred sense of direction, especially acute given the frightening speed of much of the action. But this is not the full story, for getting into the groove of repetition also incites the more positive feeling of crazed vitality or the thrill of controlling high energy. Furthermore, in Bausch’s Rite, there is the excruciating tension between this image of the machine and the signs of human physicality spilling out at every turn through breath, convulsion, and collapse: the sweat, toil, disheveled hair, dirt, and flesh.
As Bausch’s Rite progresses, the dancers are increasingly burdened by sound—which shows in their bodies. They are swept up by its power and then gradually beaten down and exhausted by it. Stravinsky once talked about a driving rod, his driving rod, that stops working and gives up in the “Sacrificial Dance.”6 So, too, in Bausch’s Rite. The authority of the music is something I will return to in this essay.
Bausch’s Rite is generally regarded today as a great dance, powerful and moving. It has lasted well: it has become a “classic” Rite. In 1978 a film was made of it, and in 2011 an excerpt from it was included in the film tribute to the choreographer after she died: Pina, directed by Wim Wenders. Availability of film and TV broadcasting of film make a huge difference to the status of a dance. But soon after its premiere, the piece began to tour live all over the world, as it still does. Crucially, however, this is also a dance in isolation, the end of a road for Bausch, before her work took a decidedly literary turn. Never again in her work was music to dominate thus (with help from musicians, she was strongly led by structure), but had she learned a lesson by choosing the most consuming dance score in history? And was her own dance to this music just too strong, too powerful? Did it become for her a symbol of her subsequent loss of nerve?
Five years after the Bausch premiere, there was another, different use of the machine image in Stravinsky’s music in the 1980 Le sacre du printemps (The Rehearsal) by the American modern dance choreographer Paul Taylor. Choreographing prior to the 1987 reconstruction of the original Rite by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, Taylor included historical research in his preparation, looking back to the work of Nijinsky as a whole. He was probably the first choreographer to use the four-hand piano score, the first dance rehearsal score (used by Nijinsky in 1913), hence his subtitle The Rehearsal. His production juxtaposes the stories of a dance class and rehearsal with that of a cartoon detective story set circa 1930, which is what the studio dancers are supposedly rehearsing. While Bausch’s Rite is still suited to the opera house in terms of size and performance context, Taylor’s demonstrates the move shared by many others toward a more modestly scaled production.
Taylor’s piece is darkly humorous, countering the genre of Rites referred to by British choreographer Richard Alston as an “all-out primitive bash,”7 which was the most common approach to the score up to that point—for instance, the mass dance by Maurice Béjart (1959), phenomenally popular, and another “classic” Rite. Instead, Taylor’s work suggests that Stravinsky’s score could stand up to irony. The sound of the piano was crucial, the persistently percussive sound, the hard skeleton of the score, eminently suitable for caustic commentary. The New Yorker critic Arlene Croce wrote of the “pistons and gears, and it’s this mechanistic aspect of the music that Taylor responds to. He hears the ticktock ostinato that winds up those massive charging rhythms—hears it as the music of automatons chugging to their doom in a deterministic universe.”8 The movement style is two-dimensional, literally (as in Nijinsky’s 1912 L’après-midi d’un faune), the protagonists like cartoon cut-outs or automata. Taylor runs riot with pulse, which is a contributing factor to his particular angle on the story.
Let us take the “Sacrificial Dance” as an example. It is in two halves, the first of these a solo for the Girl, the last of many victims in this Rite. Then, for the second half, a scrim is raised, and we see behind it the full cast in rehearsal mode and more like automata than ever before: piston pliés and arm lifts, flexed-foot jumps and grands battements, all at an absurd speed, a crazy callisthenic account of a dance class that mindlessly overpowers the woman in front. In the Coda, Taylor choreographs a fully discernible eighth-note pulse even when the music evades regularity at this level. It is rare for a “Sacrificial Dance” to be machine driven to this extent. Here, Bausch’s Victim dances on, close to collapse, continuing the dance until her breakdown—unable to get into the groove of any pulse. There are 121 dance counts, and it is the dance beat that dominates, the visual over the aural. The end of Taylor’s “Sacrificial Dance” is the death of the mass machine as well as the Girl, the company in a regimented unison collapse, followed by the Girl seconds later, and the stage curtain (another machine) having the final say with the music, its drop coinciding with the final bang.
I have emphasized the machine metaphor again in Taylor’s dance, but his machine, generated by a small group, is of quite a different order from that of Bausch: the difference between a ticktock toy (undoubtedly supported by the piano scoring) and an army tank. This other kind of machine permeates Taylor’s entire piece, and, significantly, it goes on much longer than in Bausch’s version, through to the very end of the “Sacrificial Dance.”
There have been numerous uses of the piano score since Taylor’s, an obvious solution for small dance groups or soloists who dance the Rite by themselves, who are seeking live accompaniment and need a more portable and affordable sound source than a full orchestra. But the piano’s percussive timbre—suggesting pistons, rattling, and banging—is also important. In turn, some choreographers have embraced the particular lack of liveness of the mechanical pianola recording,9 or of Fazil Say’s double-track recording merging two of his own performances on a Yamaha Disklavier.10
Lack of musical liveness has never been of interest to Mark Morris. Far from it: of all choreographers, he is probably the most vocal about needing live music for dance. Yet in June 2013 he chose to choreograph a 2011 treatment of the Rite score by the jazz trio The Bad Plus (titled On Sacred Ground) rather than Stravinsky’s original orchestral or two-piano score.11 The Bad Plus trio of piano, bass, and percussion base their work closely on the piano score, bringing out its rhythms, except in the heavily modified and technologically enhanced prerecorded “Prologue” and in a raucous signing-off riff that quotes the trio’s own composition “Physical Cities.”12
To this treatment, Morris created a dance called Spring, Spring, Spring, with no story whatsoever, no victim—instead, three teams of dancers (four men, five women, and three male-female couples), even though the burden of the dance Rite tradition is such that it is virtually impossible to avoid reading history into each new setting. Morris treats the music like a symphonic, architectural concert enterprise, not so far from the composer’s own revised concept of the work, although Morris is not the first choreographer to take this approach—a string of others have done so since 1960. As for mood, it tends toward celebration. The choreography is about “spring,” and, as in a pun, there is literally a lot of jumping.13
Motor is still powerful in this setting, but of a different, jazzy kind, with the essential component of “swing,” the juice that acquires its power from pulse. Thus, Morris takes full advantage of The Bad Plus’s enhanced syncopations, highlighting these as lightning beat and backbeat alternations within and between his teams, most effectively during “Augurs of Spring” (locking into an eighth-note pulse twice as fast as that of Bausch) and in the “Sacrificial Dance.” Indeed, Morris goes one stage further than Taylor in his “Sacrificial Dance,” starting it all off with motoric movement—regular walking at the rate of eighth notes. The dancers immediately stride out vehemently across the highly irregular surface of Stravinsky’s signature material. To take an example, this works out as six walks across the first musical motive (mm. 2–5: 
), fifty-four walks and foot-beats across the entire opening section. Much of the time, however, the dancers seem to be agents of their own motion, not entirely driven by Stravinsky. Even if they look like zombies a few times, they are soon back in the “groove,” enjoying the hippie, playful sensuality of a jazzy Rite. Surely no other choreographer has explored Rite’s rhythmic layers in such detail and with such vitality. Perhaps, most remarkable of all, the renewed physicality of stage rhythm transfers to the audience, twitching and toe tapping in their seats.
So far in my examples, Stravinsky’s music has been used, at least partly, to underscore the notion of a body driven and motorized by music (no doubt encouraged by the superhuman regularity of musical performance style referenced by Taruskin). In recent years, however, that notion has been dismantled by various choreographers, but it is crucial that the Rite has been chosen to show that dismantling process. This critique is part of the postmodern turn to review the past, to take a closer look at history and use it more overtly for comment, as Taylor began to do and Bausch had done shortly before him. After so many choreographers had changed the emphasis of the story, she decided to use “the original libretto as if viewed from afar.”14
The more recent critique of music’s role in dance, as a driving force, harks back to the various times during the twentieth century when modern dance choreographers worked to escape the tyranny of music. Instead, they sought to celebrate the autonomy of dancing bodies, creating choreography before the music, silent dances, even, as with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, dances totally independent from the music. But the tyranny of Stravinsky’s Rite, a score that encapsulates the powerful forces of both domination and vitality, over the course of a long history is special, probably without equal.
We now move into a field of Rite choreographies that is less theatrical in the usual sense of the word and that encompasses a performance approach that needs no motor, no impulse for dance movement. The new work insists on the presence of the performer with a body that has not assumed a dancerly identity in any conventional theatrical sense.
Jérôme Bel, who is part of the current European conceptual dance movement, devised a work using the Rite that is called Jérôme Bel (1995) but that is not really a Rite at all. Or is it? This piece addresses issues of authorship as part of a broader critique of theatrical representation. Bel, although his name is the title of the piece, is absent. But it seems appropriate to expand upon the work’s musical perspective, to link it to the dance tradition of Rite. The choice of the Rite score was significant. Bel explains that he wanted “to find a kind of ‘zero point . . .’ for dance. I wanted to avoid two things: the erotic body and the perfectly muscular body, the body as warrior.”15 Four naked people, representing a range of ages and builds, demonstrate the four basic principles of choreography (see Figure 2.1): the body, in a bare space, lit (an older woman holds a lightbulb—that is the extent of the illumination), and with music, the Rite score (but not rendered in any familiar fashion, instead, sung gently—the whole score—by another woman). The first task is to chalk up names on the back wall, two of their own, but also two names of people whom they are not: Thomas Edison (inventor of the electric lightbulb) and Stravinsky, Igor (his name reversed as in an academic reference).
The two dancers focus on their bodies, folds of skin, spots, painting themselves with lipstick, and the woman inscribes herself on the leg with the words “Christian Dior.” By association, we are reminded of how dancers are encoded by our own projections of beauty, “sacrificed” by us. Already, concepts such as “voyeur” and “sacrifice” resonate with Rite tradition, even as they are strangely nuanced, even undermined, in these idiosyncratic circumstances.
Meanwhile, the writing of Stravinsky’s name on the wall accentuates the distance between the creator and his work, or what the work has become. On the one hand, he too is reduced, minimalized. He is a mere cipher, somewhere else, as with Bel the choreographer—or, in sound terms, he is barely there. In this minimal rendition, the Great Art music is as theatrically reduced as everything else, the huge forces, primitivism, and eroticism drained from it, and the thousands of bodies driven by it over the century are stilled.
On the other hand, reduction celebrates connotations that have become stale through overexposure in conventional large-scale ventures. That is the paradox, through irony. The authority of Stravinsky is recognized, as theorist André Lepecki would say, his presence “over-determined,”16 through all-important naming, doubly empowered by large, public writing. Furthermore, academic-style naming places him in the super-league. At the same time, the physicality of Stravinsky is spectacularly renewed. It is hard to think of a more literally corporeal Rite, emerging from the body itself: one body (that of the singer, Yseult Roch) has “become” the name she chalked up at the start. Roch’s is a tour de force of deep and surface sounds, emanating from stomach cavity, throat, tongue, lips. Accents are spat out, and there is the semblance of speech-song. Organic production is on full view.
Figure 2.1. Jérôme Bel (1995). Photograph by Herman Sorgeloos. Copyright Jérôme Bel and Herman Sorgeloos. Used with permission.
Yet Bel’s work denies the rhythmic motor of the score as a dance motor. I now find it useful to consider that not using the score to motorize the dance is an important means of challenging dance’s traditional assumptions about the kinesthetic. The presence of such a powerful motor, neglected but sounding nonetheless, only magnifies this point.
Another contemporary “conceptual” choreographer, Xavier Le Roy, exposes many facets of physical potential within the Rite score, both machine motion and its many alternatives, the questions of driver and driven, of seeing and hearing, and of the embodiment of both these experiences. He began by returning to the phenomenon of the conductor’s dance, an idea that has a long history and that reminds us of the crucial link between music and the body and of the effects of seeing music in performance. In 2007 Le Roy made a Rite that drew slightly from the movements of Simon Rattle as he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic. Le Roy positioned himself to conduct the audience as orchestra, facing them directly most of the time, with loudspeakers under their seats representing different instruments (see Figure 2.2).17 A statement in the program primed the audience for the show and for the questions it raised about the indivisibility of music and dance through their common roots within the body: “An inversion of cause and effect unfolds: The gestures and movements meant to prompt musicians to play simultaneously appear to be generated by the music they are supposedly producing.” In our minds, cause and effect work in both directions simultaneously. Then: “When is someone playing and when is he being played by this highly motile music? What do the musicians, the conductor, and the spectators hear when hearing becomes part of an embodied, inevitably visceral experience of movement and sound?”18 But the questions expand. Can the same issues arise for musicians without a conductor, both playing and played by their music? Do we the spectators enter this game as well, our bodies too brought into play, both played upon, driven by Stravinsky’s score, and defining the way in which we will perceive the music?
Figure 2.2. Xavier Le Roy, Le sacre du printemps (2007). Photograph by Vincent Cavaroc. Copyright Vincent Cavaroc. Used with permission.
In fact, Le Roy’s Rite extends well beyond fragments of movement borrowed from Rattle. He drew, for instance, from the three “classic” choreographies of The Rite (those of Nijinsky, Béjart, and Bausch) and the Rite setting in Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Still, the live interchange between Le Roy and his spectators has remained a dominant preoccupation, as has his relation with music, which he describes as “le va-et-vient”: “Being in front of it, being behind it, being with it, ‘acting upon it,’ reacting to it. . . . The movements can appear imitative, mechanical, illustrative, passionate, detached, expressive, functional or otherwise, or they can seem to dance.”19 Thus, Le Roy includes the mechanical but goes well beyond this in terms of the primary images he projects. His story is one of flexibility and freedom to change, rhythmic play and rubato, the exchange of power—another kind of “swing,” although here, on many occasions, we become the victims, on edge, the gaze thrown back onto us. Le Roy has exposed the issue of driver and driven more vividly, perhaps, than any other choreographer.
To conclude, as much as there are still undoubtedly examples of “the all-out primitive bash,” as well as instances of bald ethnographic display, there is an intriguing strand of recent Rites that pose probing “choreomusical” questions and, in the cases of Bel and Le Roy, that are part of a fundamentally conceptual enterprise. These recent Rites seem to be prompted by a re-visioning and reaction to the past, to the Rite of Bausch (who originally wrote of such “viewing from afar”), to the original Nijinsky, and to the whole tradition of dance Rites. They also refer to the essential ambiguity within Stravinsky’s score, to both its sinister aspects and its vitality. There is no better musical work than The Rite for questioning issues of power and control in dance—whether, for instance, music gives power to or drives the body, or both—and for examining the fragile borderline between thrill and brutality.
This article draws from and expands upon material in chapter 6 of Stephanie Jordan’s Stravinsky Dances: Re-visions across a Century (Alton, UK: Dance Books, 2007) and is reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.
1. For further information on a wide range of Rite of Spring productions, including those mentioned in this article, see Jordan and Nicholas, “Stravinsky the Global Dancer.”
2. Stravinsky, Le sacre du printemps / Petrushka.
3. Motors, moving pictures, telephones, aeroplanes, radium, a whole series of discoveries and improvements in all areas of art, science, culture as a whole—each more unusual than the last, all following upon one another with greater and greater rapidity. . . .
I am far from holding with the “futurists,” who have posited the latest advances in technology as the only worthy subject for the latest art. But can one doubt that motors and aeroplanes are bound to introduce—have in fact introduced—definite modifications in the whole psyche of contemporary man. (Karatygin, “‘Vesna sviashchennaia,’” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 81, and translated in Taruskin, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, 2:1027–28)
My thanks to Richard Taruskin for alerting me to this point.
4. Taruskin, “Shocker Cools.”
5. Rivière, “Le sacre du printemps,” in Lesure et al., Igor Stravinsky, “Le sacre du printemps,” 47–48.
6. Dufour, Strawinsky à Bruxelles, 153, referring to Stravinsky as quoted in Paul Collaer, “Actuel: Paul Collaer à propos d’Igor Strawinsky,” interview by Jean-Louis Jacques and Marcel Doisy, Archives R.T.B.F. broadcast, 3 March 1971.
7. Richard Alston, quoted in Dunning, “Britain’s Oldest Ballet Troupe.”
8. Croce, “‘Le Sacre’ without Ceremony,” 138, reprinted in Going to the Dance, 271.
9. An example is the 2003 production by Javier de Frutos.
10. As in Shen Wei’s production from 2000.
11. The Rite is sufficiently iconic to have been subject to various arrangements in recent years, such as those of Hubert Laws (1971), Larry Coryell (1983), and the Butchershop Quartet (2004).
12. See Rabin, “The Bad Plus.”
13. Placing Morris’s contribution within the context of the Ojai North! Festival, critic Alastair Macaulay suggested that it could also refer to “Californian devotees of alternative cultures,” with the women in Grecian-nymph dresses, the men in bright jeans, and everyone with garlands in their hair (“A Latter-Day American Answer”).
14. Pina Bausch, premiere program note for Das Frühlingsopfer (1975), quoted in and translated by Manning in “German Rites,” 146.
15. Jérôme Bel, quoted in Siegmund, “In the Realm of Signs,” 36.
16. Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, 49.
17. I saw two performances of Xavier Le Roy’s Sacre: 25 November 2007 at L’Espace Pier Paolo Pasolini, Valenciennes, France, and 23 January 2009 at the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London. The information in this essay also draws from my interview with Le Roy, 25 November 2007; Le Roy, “Récit de travail”; and Goldschmidt-Clermont, “La danse du chef d’orchestre.” See also Solomon, “Conducting Movement.”
18. Program for the Valenciennes performance of Le sacre du printemps, 25 November 2007 (author’s translation).
19. “Être en avance, être en retard, être avec, ‘agir sur,’ réagir à. . . . Les mouvements peuvent apparaître mimétiques, mécaniques, illustratifs, passionnés, détachés, expressifs, avoir une function ou pas, danser” (Le Roy, “Récit de travail,” 46). I thank my colleague Anna Pakes for checking my translation.
