Recently my friend or rather a personal hero of mine named Millicent messaged me a photo of the Ballet Russes that included Massine and Stravinsky: who are the others.
I should really let people know not to ask questions like that because down the rabbit hole I went and my idea of a rabbit hole is like the 2nd floor of a kappa alfa house: it all ends up shoved in a drawer and never spoken of again on top of it. But rabbit hole sweet rabbit hole…without you there would be no This Is Not Swan Lake, no Sacre collections, no fried hard drive from an old Samsung lap top circa 2009.
Of course, there are so many Ballet Russes photos which I managed to get somewhat in order over the years many of which are taken at train stations, airports ships and an occasional car. Also I have about 40 performance shots but lets start with 3 “scowling Stravinsky” images. Have a look and keep scrolling away for more likely mislabeled photos of the best thing France ever did to Russia. Amusez-vous.
“scowling Igor”
And these are just the posed photos. There are so many more but I must close here for now so that it will be half finished. Far be it for me to anything correctly.
Millicent Hodson’s name will be forever attached to and revered for the reconstruction of Le Sacre du Printemps though I am loathe to call it a reconstruction: restored. That’s the word for it but God help anyone who tries to use that word legitimately. Except for me, I use it and I am sort of legitimate, right?
I sometimes forget how graceful she is for example: she mentions only the dancers or companies that produced anything worth seeing – that’s how I see it. Many years ago I asked about the Birmingham Royal Ballet and she brought up working on Riot at the Rite and Zenaida Yanowsky who played the Chosen One in the film (and with the BRB). I heard it as grace. They probably were… awful. I have no proof and no dancers have ever responded to me.
It is possible I am blackballed though I can’t be certain.
I found this old poor quality clip from her rehearsal with the Mariinsky (what?!). I was stunned that it was not perfectly shot but in 2008 Russia, you maybe had to ration film although, again I can’t be certain. I tend forget Millicent is a dancer and my God this clip outdoes even Margarita Simonova with motion of spotting in this wild turn (it’s probably termed another way but, again I can’t be certain).
Millicent Hodson has had one illustrious and industrious career. It’s takes all I have just to turn the laptop on and write meanwhile she is writing books on planes between time zones to work with ballet companies and speak at lectures and that is where I first met this tiny powerhouse.
I had moved that morning and had a tooth extraction the evening before so I think the photos were horrid. Though, yeah I can’t be certain.
Anything historical you wish to know about this ballet is found here in a spectacular interview with Millicent and Kenneth Archer. They met in London while researching the ballet and counting thousands of circles and squares to be accurate with costumes, fell in love and got married. And that was in the 80’s when the world was getting divorced. They are still married and clearly still in love. You can see it when you meet them.
Wrapping this post up makes me realize how jealous of Millicent Hodson I am. She is one of my 4 heroes. Without her, I would not have begin this archive or written this post which feels like a good one though I can’t be certain.
I have watched more crappy videos of the various courageous ballerinas who danced the role of The Chosen One over the last 12 years but I’ve pretty much stopped looking. It still boggles the mind that such a jewel in a ballet company’s Crown was filmed so poorly by nearly everyone but the Mariinsky .
Of course there are other companies -I’m certain – that have nice quality but for some reason they don’t want to release it. I suppose there is a great fear that Philistines may become educated and then where WOULD we be? Or, they just weren’t good.
And then out of the blue I stumbled upon a 1994 rehearsal video – still crappy quality – of CNB’s Ana Lacerda.
I had long thought it was impossible to get a greater lunge out of that solo then the one Zenaida Yanowsky got but I was wrong. All of the extension and perfection only turned inward and awkward it’s just stunning. There is something very special about Ana Lacerda. She is an elegant ballerina an emotional contemporary dancer a gorgeous model and on top of all that she’s a sweet person. This combination doesn’t usually conclude with the words “sweet person”. I suppose you could say simply she is an exceptional person.
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And I’m so glad that the video is rehearsal so that the dress is not covering what she’s achieving. She’s elegant, she is right on time boy right on each mark though sadly the video will show something a little different because it’s so old and the settings were a little weird.
I wish I could see rehearsal footage of each dancer just to see what is happening, what they’re doing with their body that you cannot see because of the costume.
Would that not interest you? Doesn’t this amazing stunning video of Ana Lacerda make you want that? If you are not saying “yes” then you may have wandered off the path from the Nutcracker or some other torturous thing. Cirque du Soleil.
I’ve wanted to post this for a year. I can’t tell you why I haven’t except that maybe I’m not sure of the kid’s name and I didn’t want to seem like a dork calling him “Daniel the Mad Scientist”. But I think by now, it’s pretty clear that I’m going to be considered a dork (at the very least) in some crowds and furthermore, I don’t give a flying shit. Whoever this is, he can dance. It’s spellbinding. This a like “contra-moving”, going against everything the body wants to do naturally and then making it a natural movement. This reminds me of (of course) Vaslav Nijinsky.
In 1913 – as we know by now – Nijinsky created the first “antiballet” by by choreographing in opposition to refinement: angles, turned in feet…he was staying true to the scenario of a Sun God dick a tribe’s survival and a suicide virgin. She is picked by teenagers!
He abandoned traditional ballet to meet the time period. And it worked! Seventy years later. In 1913 it did him in.
There are companies like “theatre du corps” making use of dancers like the kid in the above clip as well as martial artists and street dancers. These young people are touring the world now, making a living, learning other forms of dance and getting a chance to “become” with this unusual gift of artistry they possess which in most cases ends up going nowhere but the clubs. Check out Julien Deroualt though. These clips pf Daniel and other dancers – they could dance like this. I’ve watched kids jookin in videos who could bring something more here.
But I don’t know of any company from the Portugal, Russia., Finland etc who hangs around in garages performing for each other the way these kids were doing 15 years back with Jookin. Their commitment to their style and growth of it is so much deeper than anything I have seen or heard about from ballerinas and choreographers no matter who. They have become trapped. There is joy in their art but there is more in this:
So, “Daniel the Mad Scientist” if that’s who you are and if it is not please write me and let me know, and all of you who are dancing like this: you’re gifted. You’re creating motion against itself and you seem to be doing it organically, you know?
Aim high, Send video and portfolios to the biggest creative companies. Stay away from Jan Fabre and Marie Chouinard. Google it.
EDIT from 2024 Ruben Noel aka Rubix.
This kid makes you wait. He doesn’t deliver when YOU want but when he wants and shit he should have or could be a jazz player who never makes any money. He is authentic and maybe the best dancer I have seen lately. He’s breaking into some performance work like I haven’t seen in hip hop before. You can find better quality stuff of his with Kuty and Criminalz but I will conclude with this:
From Nikinsky to Memphis jookin to Julien Derouault of Theatre du Corps to Rubix: they all are creating and dancing against the norm and when you do that…I believe…you wring everything out of yourself and leave it on the stage the streets, some school gym..for the next guy to learn from. That’s how it should be.
“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
I think free jazz players should give this some thought. Sorry Dad.
For years I have thought I understood what it was about but really, I was on the periphery. That did not stop me from waxing ridiculous when I started this blog. On I went about Le Sacre in 2006 but I wrote from the sheer emotional crush of it- the spiritual entanglement that befalls many of us lay people. To hell with the academics.
And so I count my blessings to have been connected with Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. I have learned a lot about the ballet from them and also how to remain inclusive with it, never condescending. Because everyone who comes at it , comes from their own direction and there we all meet anyway. Doesn’t matter if a person is short on facts or the only one who has them, we all turn our toes in the same.
Am I going to emo-blog here? Nicholas Roerich. Yes, I knew who he was but I did not know what he did. He was, as Doctor Archer explains in this little disastrously amateur video I have thrown together, the “father of the ballet”. Without his word, Nijinsky wasn’t budging on the choreography. Which I think Stravinsky may have borrowed for his own but no matter how you slice this, they are mad Russians in the end.
Also dead. They are dead Russians.
There is a lot of online stuff liking Roerich to Rasputin and I am like “hey, I am already sold”. You don’t need to sweeten it up with darkness. Well, anymore than we already have here.
So Kenneth Archer tells the tale and I butcher it all into a video. Look! Here it is now!
The tribe depends on the sun god Jarilo to warm the earth thereupon they must immediately stomp the energies into the earth. The crops will grow, the animals will flourish and the year will be plentiful. There is no free lunch with Jarilo. He wants to be paid and – what a shocker – he wants a virgin. But he is a sick god and he wants her to commit suicide. This is one sick little marriage.
Being a virgin in Roerich’s Pagan Russia was such a known liability so why not take the chance on being a slut? I mean, I did it in 1981 and I survived. Of course, the stakes were different…anyway…
Izadora Weiss and Wojciech Misiuro , directors of the Baltic Dance Theater has done what no choreographer has been able to do with the concept and music of Le Sacre du Printemps: turn it into a traumatic experience. This is not fringe or experimental. It is irresponsible. Although it is not visually the “useless whore” statement of this photo, it throws its lot in with it.
I used to do some performance stuff that was out there, lyrics about my rape set to circus music, delivering a “baby” at the prom and stuffing it in the trash making sure no one sees…it was dark comedy. Fringe and experimental, a little offensive but for the most part, no one really knew what was going on. I am funny on stage and can distract from the content. Yikes…I just realized I am a slapstick comedienne. Gross.
But what Izadora Weiss has done is use a misogynistic objectification of a woman: not Chosen but victimized and psycho-sexually controlled – to interpret the libretto of Le Sacre and really, I get it. Any woman who has been involved with a violent malevolent sadist and who would think the abuse is really because he loves her and she is the one WOULD get it because hey look…right in this photo you can see the promise of love in his fist.
Yes. There is an implied intimacy in this photo.
Weiss and Misiuro’s “Rite” is not experimental. It is calculated. This isn’t dark comedy. It is simply dark. It is horrible.
These photos alone are not easy to look at. This is not a submissive orsacrificed Chosen One. It is a controlled victim. This performance does not use domination and submission as a dark exploration of Le Sacre nor is it a commentary. It is an indifference.
It goes too far. I can’t believe I am saying this but it is worse than Preljojac’s Rite of Spring “gang rape”.
I write constantly that I strive to bring dance to the “ballet is frigging stupid” set. This ballet would most assuredly attract people who would otherwise never watch ballet. Unfortunately, those people would be sexual sadists and violent misogynists.
There are clips available online for this performance and they too will draw men in for a yank. The thought that strangers to Stravinsky’s masterpiece may play it while abusing their victims – even in a consensual psycho sexual relationship – sort of makes me want to puke.
I started this collection, this scavenging operation in 2007. I have made no money. It’s all been for the good of the people. Sounds lofty but listen, I am talking about people like me who are drawn to the choreography for some reason. We found each other on my YouTube channel and the conversations began and my God…what a blessing. Didn’t see it coming.
A kid in middle school wrote to me today about wanting to see rehearsal footage to help him do a little staging for school. Adding that to the request for a full performance other than the old Joffrey or the many boring Mariinsky, I started to get a little bummed out. But it is out of reach. For me. Other people, other companies can have it. But for some reason I am refused. And what the hell is that about?
Why won’t these companies do what I do and share that which is so significant that the question of copyright should be a sacrilege. Why must they refuse the music majors the visual experience that has become part of the curriculum for the Rite of Spring course? I don’t get it and for some reason I am taking it so personally.
For the first time, I want to quit.
Probably because there is an 8th grade kid named Alex who, like many who are oddly drawn to the choreography, he can’t get it out of his head but he takinf steps and he is getting school mates to perform it. He was hoping for rehearsal footage to help him. Anything. I had nothing to give.
He made t-shirts that look like the different costumes.
Have you ever held a door open saying “after you” to which that person says “no, after you”?
Although I can’t prove it, I’m almost certain that this exchange happened at such a level of ethereality that you have to suspend disbelief if you want to go any further in this article because only one of these people was alive.
Not for long though.
(Stay with me)
After a grueling stretch of picking the bones of this long lost skeleton we know as 1913’s “Le Sacre du Printemps”, Millicent Hodson, Kenneth Archer with Robert Joffrey presented one of the most defining moments in dance history; one so far reaching that I don’t believe anyone really knew in the beginning just how far it would go and the types of people it would reach. I am proof. So are 1200 people who have commented on the Joffrey “Le Sacre” video on YouTube since 2007. That’s another story.
Thank heavens they delivered. If they did not pursue Sacre as hard as they did for all those years to find Nijinsky’s masterpiece then I would be telling a very different tale right now perhaps called What the hell was Kenneth Macmillan thinking??
So was it good? Was the 1989 Joffrey performance – aside from being historically significant, good? That’s baby talk.
It was alarming An 80 year lost ballet became the current-day yardstick by which we measure bad choreography. That’s the bigtime.
But let’s talk about the young man who was deliberately left behind: Vaslav Nijinsky.
Denied, cast off, crumbling mentally, no longer dancing, fearing his life is becoming threadbare, he suffered from the cold fact that his masterpiece was not only misunderstood, but intentionally forgotten. Slowly, he became notes left in a drawer here, a scrap there, a memory, a sketch…he was being erased.
Each year his ghost became less until it had no voice , until there was no form, until only the vague defeated lingering presence of Nijinsky was occasionally alert in the wings of some stage or other, certain that he would never see his work realized, or even be realized for it.
Someone is reading this thinking all that is missing is mist floating around a fat soprano hollering Italian at us. And one can think that, absolutely. They would, however, be missing the biggest piece of this undefinable salvage of dance and spirit and the mystery of human nature but, hey, stick with the probable and I will take the possible. Like Jerry Lewis at a Mariinsky reception, I will still take the possible.
Now remember what Stravinsky said about being “the vessel through which le sacre passed”? If Stravinsky’s own words hold sway on the concept of receiving something – and we are talking about a man proclaimed a genius for all time – then the logic would follow that there was, indeed, a deep spiritual event taking place that spring in the months leading up to May 29, 1913. Of course “Spiritual Event At The Rite” doesn’t sell like “Riot…” and well well, here we are.
But it never happened.
With the first whistle or yell or shout, there was an undoing of what should have been done and by an annoying rioting aristocracy. However…when you examine our own human nature it is likely that these people railed against themselves and their own inability to see, hear or process what was going on. It was a sensory overload and when we do not understand something or we are disturbed by something that feels strange we lash out. We do not, in all cases, stretch ourselves to meet the strangeness.
These French patrons of the arts were stuffy, entitled and living in an era where it was acceptable to be so and their money dictated the stage. Wrong people. Wrong era. And there would be no stretching. Just an effigy.
Stravinsky was flush and Nijinsky never had a chance. Imagine, to be so thickly present and indulged the world over, draped in accolades and given the opportunity to choreograph what will be synonymous with your name, you go all in and lose it all.
He did something so risky with the Sacre choreography because he had the courage to stand by his artistic vision and honor the scenario. How many artists will walk head held high all the way to a metaphorical dumpster without giving in? It’s unlikely he considered it this way because the few who have followed their artistic calling are not aware of how big that moment is.
Nijinsky broke the ground and opened a door for everyone who couldn’t or, worse, didn’t . Then someone reached from the other side and helped him keep in open: Robert Joffrey.
Millicent Hodson, in congress with forces she may have suspected – I think she did – brought something close to perfection to the stage . Did she and Kenneth Archer realize the alchemy of that? Did they suspect that Nijinsky was present? Or that he was finally free after 70 silent years to create a crown from an albatross?
Did he feel the weight of his loss become weightless in Robert Joffrey’s triumph? I say yes. Nijinsky left what meant the most to him as an inheritance to a man who would soon die and leave it to what meant the most to him: his ballet company.
What explanation is there for a regularly changing group of dancers to exist for 34 minutes as something outside of themselves year in and year out? To even exist for 4 minutes in that unmoored and almost aggressive space would be a struggle at best. But not for them.
Robert Joffrey got that choreography onto the stage before he died, freeing Nijinsky. Who waited at the door to free Robert Joffrey. And together they left. One hell of an Inheritance.
Here are the only photographed female dancers of the Ballet Russes’ first staging of Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps from 1913.After 4 hours of trying to tease out the real names even with Lynn Garafola and Millicent Hodson’s publications, I could not determine the actual names. Here is the best I could do.
Julitska (nope) Zhulitska? nope
Marie Rambert ding!
Jadwiga Jezierska (close enough/ semi ding!)
Boni (nope)Janina Boniecka (ding!)
Doris Faithful (ding!)
And then of course is the terrible foreshadowing of the Chosen One, Maria Plitz.
This is the only known photograph of Maria Plitz, the first girl to dance herself to death but while people were hurling rotting vegetables at her and real Russian Pagans showed up and shot arrows at her and then the other girls laughed and didn’t include her in anything anymore. Ok, that is a lie I think. But they were booing and disrupting and Nijinsky was going shithouse in the wings. Don’t believe me?
Ladies, Chosen Ones who I have championed, fought for, searched for tirelessly… Maria Plitz was your destiny.
You are all Maria Plitz.
Marjo, Susanna, Kirsi, Katja, Asta, no photos at all: you are Maria Plitz.
Paula Passos, Renata Versiani, same: you are Maria Plitz.
Patrizia Manieri, you are Maria Plitz.
Heather
Heather Aagard:you are more than that. –>
You started this whole archive project, you! And were it not for you, no one would be documented at all.
le sacre du printemps: the collections 