In 2007 curator RoseLee Goldberg invited the dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer to make a contribution to that year’s Performa festival, Performa 07. Rainer’s work would consider “what it meant to be radical in 1913 in Paris, when composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky joined forces to produce the riot-inducing The Rite of Spring.”1 As a creator, she would confront many philosophical and aesthetic challenges. For example, would her “restagings, reconstructions, or reenactions” have implications for contemporary performance and theory? Would “the process of reconstructing [become] itself an empirical study of the ideas contained in the work”?2
When a dancer creates a new choreography of The Rite, her or his work joins a repertory of circa two hundred other versions produced since 1913. The music of Stravinsky should have been the basic accompaniment to all these interpretations—but which version of the score? As Robert Craft points out in his introduction to the facsimile edition of Stravinsky’s working materials published by Boosey & Hawkes, the composer’s process of revision did not immediately result in one urtext.3 For decades, Stravinsky treated The Rite of Spring as a text in progress; revised versions of the score were published in 1921, 1929, and 1948. Thus, seeking the essence of this avant-garde icon requires the intense study of all its sources. And beyond this, when reinterpreting The Rite anew, any choreographer “re-sources” all such sources through reflection and queries.
When Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer began their project of reconstructing Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography and Nikolai Roerich’s stage settings of The Rite, they scrutinized numerous documents, images, and near-mythical descriptions of the scandalous Parisian premiere of the ballet in 1913.4 Within a ten-year period, Millicent Hodson reconstructed Nijinsky’s choreography as far as extant documentation would allow, and the Joffrey Ballet performed the Hodson/Archer adaptation in 1987 (see Figure 3.1). Thus Hodson (with Archer) successfully encouraged contemporary reaction to Nijinsky’s style of movement presented at the premiere in 1913.5
Figure 3.1. Photograph of Joanna Wozniak as the Chosen One in the Robert Joffrey Ballet’s production of Le sacre du printemps. Photograph by Herbert Migdoll.
How could a choreographer today—and especially a postmodernist one such as Yvonne Rainer—get hold of the conditions, the emotions, and the reactions of the original “riot at the Rite”? Indeed, it was exactly this matter—the possibility (or impossibility) of resurrecting a canonical piece of art and reactions to it—that motivated her to accept the invitation of Performa 07. Rainer’s interpretation was ultimately a turning point in her career as a choreographer, and as a performer and dance-artist as well. In the 1960s and 1970s she was widely known as one of the first and most significant dancers of the Judson Dance Theater; moreover, she was close to performance art, minimalist art, and the international network known as Fluxus.6 With the fusion of ideas from these artistic communities, Rainer created choreographies that radically altered the ways in which dance and theater were understood. For example, she transformed the idea of the body in dance by reinterpreting everyday movements such as walking, running, standing, or transporting objects into task-oriented performances. In her famous and radical “No Manifesto” from 1965, she proclaimed “no” to the expected virtuosity in dance and “no” to the spectacle associated with staging in the theater.7 In her words, “The mind is a muscle”—she addressed the dancer as a “neutral,” nonexpressive “doer” instead.8
In 2006, just before her invitation to Performa 07, Rainer had created a choreography based on George Balanchine’s choreography for Stravinsky’s ballet Agon; here Rainer’s interests had turned away from performance art exclusively toward dance.9 AG Indexical, with a Little Help from H.M. (2006) reinvents Balanchine’s choreography and translates it into Rainer’s aesthetic.10 Her choreography sparked controversy in the dance world; critics accused her of trivializing and creating parodies of the earlier ballet. And they noted that she was now choreographing “to music” and had returned to the staging of spectacles in the theater—the very principles she had rejected in the legendary Judson Memorial Church performances. For the dance world, this work was a step backward by an iconic figure of postmodern dance.
Just at the moment when RoseLee Goldberg asked her to contribute to Performa 07, Rainer viewed the BBC film Riot at the Rite, a fictionalized reenactment of the creation and premiere of the ballet. All the characters associated with The Rite are on view; foremost among them are Igor Stravinsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Nikolai Roerich, and Sergei Diaghilev. The movie culminates on that infamous night, 29 May 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, when the ballet was premiered. The film shifts back and forth between scenes onstage and in the rioting audience. Although the scenario is a dramatization, it successfully captures the audience’s violent reaction to both radical music and a very unexpected choreography.11 Rainer vividly remembered her reaction to this movie—she was inspired to use the film as a soundtrack in RoS Indexical, fusing Stravinsky’s Rite with clips from the film to form a multimedia soundtrack.
Rainer’s choice of this conflated soundtrack calls attention to another concept: What are “sources” in art, in music, and in dance history? How are they canonical, on the one hand, and distorted, enriched, revised, and fictionalized, on the other? Rainer is undoing a possible search for the original, the idea of an authentic reconstruction, and the model of a canonical and pure, unadulterated masterwork of performing arts. Indeed, she is relying on and making a Rite in an impure, hybrid, and bastardized form; she has replaced the purely musical sound of the Stravinsky score with the riotous, broken, and disrupted sounds of the BBC film. Together they produce a mixture of music and shouting, a blending of a musical work and a fictional reinvention of the “riot.”
Rainer knew and had high regard for Millicent Hodson’s research on The Rite and her restaging of it.12 Nevertheless, in RoS Indexical, she distanced herself from the idea of a reconstruction. She held that “historical memory disintegrates and reconfigures just when we think we are drawing near to the object of our scrutiny.”13 For Rainer, the question of re-sourcing Nijinsky’s choreography was meant as both “a tribute to [its] historical significance and a challenge to [its] canonical status.”14 Rainer emotionally projected her complex, ambivalent relation to The Rite as a combination of utter resistance and irresistible attraction. For all these reasons, she called her work a “re-vision.”
In Rainer’s choreography, the material was changing constantly—she spoke of an analogy to aging bodies articulating different experiences in the accumulated history of their movements. The four dancers in the work’s premiere—Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers—ranged from thirty to sixty years old. They embodied different dance styles and techniques, ranging from the trained-body movements of classical and contemporary ballet (each in her own way) to the everyday motions of the nonprofessional. The choreography also reflected Rainer’s own physical history and the history of her dance techniques—and her fascination with the movements an aging body could perform.15
Moreover, the complex reception history of The Rite inspired Rainer to rethink and enact her own personal relation to the notion of the “Heroic” in dance and music. “Disruptive glories” was the key concept of her relation to renowned historical figures: “Disruptive glories. Works that outraged or stunned their audiences when first performed; works that assaulted preceding notions of connoisseurship and taste; works that stepped beyond tradition and marked their creators as ‘deviant, outside the bounds of society.’”16 Rainer simultaneously created an homage and shaped an ironic, critical reading of earlier choreographies of The Rite with her reflective handling of these historical materials. In RoS Indexical, the dancers displayed, repeated, and varied typical sequences of movements, poses, and rhythmic phrases from Hodson’s reconstruction and from the renowned 1975 choreography of The Rite by Pina Bausch. Rainer used well-known, documented motions and gestures to reenvision Nijinsky’s “crime against grace” and Pina Bausch’s iconic interpretation. During the performance four dancers recapitulated the processes of these appropriations by scanning the music and communicating about movements, using the video as both score and memory aid.
RoS Indexical opens with the four dancers sitting at a small table downstage right. Three of them wear headphones because they are listening to a version of The Rite of Spring—and they begin to hum the famous opening melody of the bassoon solo (Rainer identifies it as “the oboe solo”) (see Figure 3.2).17 Rainer explained that their being “off-key” (because of their untrained voices) was exactly the point for her! This kind of re-sourcing/re-performing recalls the long debate around the questions of the complexities of The Rite’s difficult rhythms and the challenges faced in rehearsals.18 Moreover, Rainer’s “re-vision” commented on Stravinsky’s Rite as an act of consummate professionalism, a success story.19 This fact intrigued her: Nijinsky’s choreography broke the conventions of ballet, the aesthetic of the ballet-body.20 But today Nijinsky’s and Stravinsky’s Rite “is a star in the pantheon of dance history.”21
Figure 3.2. Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical, opening scene, with dancers Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers. Printed with the kind permission of Yvonne Rainer.
In part 2 of RoS Indexical, sixteen double-sided banners (designed by Joel Reynolds) drop down from the flies, imprinted with terms and words including “terror,” “glories,” “suffer,” “struggle,” and “tasks” but also “lunch,” “sofa,” “Who? Me?,” and “aargh.” This technique comprises another manner of referring to the “sources” and “re-sourcing.” Rainer explained that she wanted to avoid academic discourse and the discussion around the terms “history,” “tribe,” and “sacrifice” with their “explicit references” to the pagan ritual as imagined by archaeologist/ artist Nikolai Roerich in his collaboration with Nijinsky and Stravinsky.22 Rainer chose a process of “elimination” instead.
Rainer omitted the terrors and glories of the pagan sacrifice yet concurrently replicated elements of the Slavic folklore patterns of Roerich’s costume design. Indeed, Rainer sought a way to “move forward and backward in time,”23 from the emotionality and pathos of terror and sacrifice to banal and commonplace words such as “lunch” and “sofa.” Indeed, she presented the election of the Chosen One merely with the everyday question of “Who? Me?” (see Figure 3.3). In this context, Rainer described her work as “pedagogical vaudeville,”24 as she interprets RoS Indexical as both pedagogy and entertainment (a complex interweaving of re-sourcing!). With these banners Rainer creates her own distinctive mix of the Brechtian gesture of “showing” and pedagogically entertaining vaudeville.
Figure 3.3. Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical, part 2, with dancers Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers. Printed with the kind permission of Yvonne Rainer.
Rainer’s use of the term “indexical” in her work’s title signals a multifaceted and reflective approach to stage representation. By designating her piece as “indexical,” she is making a selection from a canon of works of dance history while simultaneously setting her own work in a certain tradition—though her own interpretation of the canon is neither comprehensive nor beyond dispute. “Indexicality” in semiotics refers to a specific form of indicating. The founder of modern semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, distinguished among iconic, symbolic, and indexical signs.25 Indexical signs point to something and hence direct attention toward that something. Anything that aligns attention, according to Peirce, can be an index; in turn, each and every behavior can be interpreted indexically. Thus, indexicality is essentially a function of communicative context.
In affixing this label to her Stravinskian re-visions, Rainer played with the possibilities and ambiguities of the indexical. She drew attention to a path leading to something that was an “original”—The Rite of Spring. However, this is a path neither direct nor transparent—and certainly not one leading to an “original” performance. Here the referential directions of the indexical were, in fact, twisting and turning around on themselves.
In the last part of RoS Indexical, Rainer omitted any relation to Nijinsky’s choreography and the sources of her re-vision. In the “Danse sacrale,” Rainer violently combines the gestures and movements of Hodson’s reconstruction with the diametrically opposed gestures and movements of Pina Bausch. The dancers reenact the gestures of Robin Williams and those of Sarah Bernhardt in a silent film from 1911 (see Figure 3.4). This act was Rainer’s way to displace and replace the “Dance of the Chosen One”—in short, “the sacrifice of the virgin is ignored!”26 Thus the extreme effects, the pathos, and the dancing of sacrifice and death are re-sourced by the erotic, even obscene movements of Robin Williams and “the great diva’s demonstrations of pathos and despair, enactments that depart radically from what we might think The Rite of Spring was about.”27
Figure 3.4. Yvonne Rainer, RoS Indexical, final section, with dancers Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers. Printed with the kind permission of Yvonne Rainer.
In denying the pathos and political representation of The Rite (through a collective ritual of communitas), Rainer re-sourced the dualities in the reception of The Rite of Spring. Thus she was re-visioning the aesthetic and representational break with tradition in dance and theater that is part of the history of Nijinsky’s/Stravinsky’s Rite. And indeed, at the same time, as she acknowledged, “history is something we can neither escape nor replicate.”28 Coolness and the attitudes of an ironic detachment replaced the melodramatic poses, thus showing how one might re-source the “sacrifice” after 1945. Yvonne Rainer’s Indexical pointed out that questions of transmission were at once personal and political, a result both of chance and of her aesthetic decisions in combining ironic distance with critical commitment. By opening a dialogue around the sources and their contextualizations, Rainer offered a new way of rethinking The Rite.
1. Goldberg, “What We Did and Why,” 16. The festival was also a venue for the retrospectives of performance artists—for example, Marina Abramović’s contribution was a re-creation of her entire oeuvre.
2. Ibid., 19.
3. Craft, “Genesis of a Masterpiece,” xv–xvi. See also Craft, “A Chronology of the Revisions”; and van den Toorn, Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring,” 40–41. Concerning the process of composition in relation to the rhythm of Stravinsky’s Rite, see McDonald, “Jeux de Nombres,” 400n6.
4. For explanation of their reconstruction as a whole, see Hodson and Archer, The Lost Rite; Hodson, Nijinsky’s Crime against Grace.
5. Brandstetter, “Ritual as Scene and Discourse.”
6. Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched, 279. See also Dziewior and Engelbach, Yvonne Rainer, 100–101; and Sachs, Yvonne Rainer, chap. 1.
7. For the text of the “No Manifesto” and Rainer’s later thoughts on the document, see Rainer, Feelings Are Facts, 263–64.
8. Rainer, “The Mind Is a Muscle,” 65, italics mine.
9. Ortiz, “Dance under Performa’s Umbrella,” esp. 66.
10. Birns, “Retrospectives and New Beginnings,” 53.
11. Rainer, “RoS Indexical,” 103.
12. Ibid., 105–106.
13. Ibid., 106.
14. Ibid., 105.
15. Rainer, “Skirting and Aging.” See also Nakajima, “Aging Body in Dance.”
16. Rainer, “RoS Indexical,” 104.
17. Ibid., 107.
18. Nijinska, Early Memoirs, esp. chap. 51, “Fall and Winter Season: 1912–1913,” 452, and chap. 52, “Preparation of Le sacre du printemps: London and Monte Carlo,” 457–63.
19. Rainer, “RoS Indexical,” 105.
20. Ibid.; see also Brandstetter, “Ritual as Scene and Discourse,” 46 ff.
21. Rainer, “RoS Indexical,” 107.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 108.
25. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, xx, 10.
26. Rainer, “RoS Indexical,” 107 ff., esp. 108.
27. Ibid., 108.
28. Ibid.
