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.
Artist. The strokes to define it get broader and broader…but there is a pearl in every 50 or so clam shells. Artistry is free to be what it chooses, ask any jazz player who has never played with more than 15 people in the audience. But that’s another story.
I had begun exploring the strong spiritual connection to Le Sacre du Printemps that exists in non-dancers. It’s like a barnacle. It attaches and won’t be ignored. So we create from there: painting, photography, writing, debating on my ’87 Joffrey video on YouTube for 7 years….
If you’re going to have a barnacle, this is the one to have because it pulls something out of you but then returns it to you with another layer.
Artist Roza Puzynowska created something with paint and canvas that was well received and celebrated in Poland and globally. This happens.
But her subject was Le Sacre and she returned it to us with that other layer! And this is something that only the gifted can recognize and embrace and give back. I look at the scale of her subject and that alone is overwhelming. Gericault”Raft-of the Medusa” overwhelming. But a bit more novel.
She used the dancers of Teatr Wielki Opera Narodowa as models and distorted them into something that is as equally compelling in its stationary existence as the ballet is – or should be – in it’s frenetically intense motion.
Are you with me?
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is a musical miracle, freestanding, dependant upon nothing else but itself.
Nijinsky’s “Le Sacre” should spring from the score and reach its own space but it does not necessarily do that. There is no math. There is no logic. It is from the gut (like say, TMRJ?) or it doesn’t come. As a stand alone piece it runs the risk of derailing anytime the curtain goes up, save The Joffrey which holds the Nijinsky Inheritance (you can read on that here).
Puzynowska’s stationary presentation of Le Sacre is not some paint and canvas installation. It is startling: a denial of space restriction, a sporadic saturation, an intimate knowledge of the demand on the body: bodies she knows personally that releve’ this way, constrict that way and she delivers a free standing work of art.
She threads a needle here because the paintings did not spring from the solidified Rite but rather from the complex ballet that sometimes struggles to solidify itself.
This is the “layer” that the barnacle returned. The proof is on the canvas.
Congratulations to the artist Roza Puzynowska for her fearlessness in picking up something that is so alternately strong and fragile in spirit that its failure would seem a sure thing.
Instead, she has given us another meaningful layer in the mystery of Le Sacre.
Here is Mary Wigman a pioneer in expressionist dancing performing her “Witch Dance” which she debuted in Berlin in 1914. She was very influential in “creepy movement in film”, as the narrator explains. This is all very “silent-movie creature-of-the-night” type of stuff that she is doing, isn’t it? Yet at the same time, when I first saw it, I thought “wait…..is this Norma Desmond?” Looks like her, yeah?
You see, I never heard of Mary Wigman. Have you? I’ll tell you why you haven’t.
As “ahead of her time” as this “artist ” may have been, when Hitler took control of Germany, this free thinking, Wiemar-era visionary handed all of her Jewish dancers/employees and friends right over to the Nazis.
In slow, dramatic, creepy motions, I’m sure.
This horror may explain why today was the first time I ever heard of this “visionary”. An act of cowardice like that sort of negates all that progressiveness. All that boldness. And what’s left is a dancing Nazi who is given little credit for her contribution. Those who promote her have missed the point, They just consider themselves avant garde.
Here ballet’s icon Dame Margot Fonteyne drives that point a bit by failing to make any mention whatsoever of Wigman – who is obviously in advance of her time with that witch dance (1914) and should be mentioned somewhere between Nijinksky (1913) and Kurt Jooss’ “Green Table” (1932).Check it out:
A friend of mine said “she probably didn’t know what was being done to the Jews or maybe she was scared” to which I replied “If you can get up on stage and do that fucking witch dance during Nazi occupation, you aren’t scared – you’re indifferent.” And her indifference snuffed out what should have been her legend. Wigman died in 1973 at the age of 86. Just enough years to watch her name become synonymous with….nothing.
Years back I got my hands on the Ballet Boyz’ “Rite of Spring” which starts out in a unique way but man I have never seen anything crash and burn so fast. There is this old BDSM lady who makes angry faces who walks around during Spring Rounds and I wrote:
“What’s with the old dominatrix lady making faces during Spring Rounds?”
They forced a hard copyright violation on Youtube. I think that was the last public appearance of this casserole of nonsense.
So watch the opening 3 minutes if you can and then…should you actually be reading this…tell me it’s great. I’m sure this is the first time you will see it. Tell me it’s 2nd only to Nijinsky. And include your address because I WILL come bitch slap you. You may not know when….but bet on it.
If your ballet sucks and you get someone who is syndicated to write how bad it is…take it! You will likely never even get asked to do Circue du Soleil so take any mention you can get.
Lord Henry Wotton said “The only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked about.” Actually, Oscar Wilde said it and stuffed it into The Picture of Dorian blah blah”. Here is the “ballet” for you to judge for yourself:
You know why the English National Ballet only released small clips of Ivan Vasiliev in their 2011 staging of Roland Petit’s “le jeune homme et la mort”?
Because he is terrible. He is trying to sell it with facial expressions and it is ridiculous! It’s like a German art film escaped from 1920 and landed in overalls on the English stage.
This dude – from what I have read – can’t handle criticism. Kid, I know you will never read this but – what is wrong with you?? You distract from the ballet, from the dark libretto, from your own fantastic talent as a dancer with all those Buster Keaton faces and do you know what Cocteau was driving at?
I’ll tell you because it seems no one else has.
You are obsessed with this woman making a dumb pose in the doorway wearing a fabulous dress but when she gets to your side, you are plunged into sheer terror. SHEER! One obscenely stupid anxious face to the next.
You’re about to get a blowjob from a woman you are dying to have yet your face is..it’s like you look down and its the Commendotore from Don Giovanni come to bite it off and cast you into hell (though, she will, in fact do that at a later point).
I saw a Chosen One fall apart in the first 60 seconds once. It was a road tour and perhaps she was tired but as her ability to dance faded she tried to compensate with facial expressions. I was in the 2nd row and fully satisfied already with the corp de ballet of the jaw dropping first act.
I couldn’t watch but I was too visible to look away. As soon as she was raised by the elders I ran for the door and it slammed before the applause began. What are you gonna do. She didn’t see me.
And he is an amazing dancer, Tsk tsk. Unlike Nicholas le Riche, however, Ivan can’t dance the role because he is acting it. He simply can not do it and I would rather watch that Chosen One for 3 hours straight than to watch him confusing the entire point with his face.
I hear he maintains the expression through the curtain call. Idiot.
And why can’t anyone get to the oral copulation scene without sloppily running into it? Can’t anyone do it like Delphine!
I’ve spent the last few weeks studying Act I of the Nijinsky choreography to Le Sacre du Printemps, this on the heels of coming away wholly disappointed in the Sacrificial Danse performed by the Joffrey in March. The Sacrificial Danse – have I been too fixated on that? It is, after all, the pinnacle, the reason for the story, the purpose of the ballet but how often do we miss the forest for the trees?
Act I.
You MUST see it live to appreciate it. Nijinsky had 5 different groups performing 4 – 8 different things at the same time. This is choreography on par with Mozart’s absence of recitative in the Marriage of Figaro. I never realized it until watching from the 3rd row. A wide angle shot peppered with close-ups does not do it justice. But somewhere between 1987 – when the Joffrey debuted the Nijinsky work with no blueprint, nothing to study and only the concept of The Rite and the importance of the music- and 2008 when the Mariinsky released the DVD, the only commercially available version of Le Sacre, something happened. What was a full engagement, a risk and a breaking of ground by the Joffrey became nothing more than steps done to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by The Mariinsky. Even years later with Daria Pavlenko, same deal.
Induldge me.
The Joffrey had to rely entirely on its comprehension of the story and Stravinsky’s music which requires – no demands – the release of everything one knows musically to make space for the Rite. And they did just that.
Years and many performances later, the Mariinsky is counting, they are waiting to do the next step, are entirely outside of the music and have reduced Nijinsky’s masterpiece to a paint-by-number effort. They do not at any point engage. Do you see it?
Giving them a Mulligan by saying the commonness of the constant performance may have dulled them is absolutely wrong and here is why: when I saw the Joffrey in March…they performed with the same intuition for the music that they did in 1987! Act One was fully thought out by Nijinsky and was designed to embrace Stravinsky’s oddities. You can not possibly see it for what it is until you see it live. And The Joffrey owns it.
The Mariinsky’s lack of interpretation, absence of engagement with the music reinforces my claim that this company and perhaps Russian dancers on the whole have no ability to connect. They accept instruction and execute as told and that…that will never due with Le Sacre du Printemps.
My mother is Ukrainian and is the coldest person I have ever met. I am told she looked bored as she counted breaths at my birth.
You know Marie Chouinard pissed herself on stage in her first performance, right? Well, she did. So where do you go from there? Considering I called her stupid in the title, you know this is not going to be a puff piece.
I tried. I did. Especially with Body Remix because it was evident that Marie Chouinard is a sound artist. I found one minute that was ok. That’s it up there.
And that’s where it ends. Why didn’t anyone stop her? I mean she is just terrible and, as I had feared, she went full nipple when she had her dancers stop wearing those shiny things in that aforementioned thing of which there is 20 seconds.
I’m not sure what this is, don’t care. I MUST acknowledge she is brilliant with audio. Maybe even up there with Janet Cardiff. She should have stopped there.
You can’t imagine how hard I tried to like this chick.
I just….I….just look at her Le Sacre du Printemps:
Someone should have stopped her. I live in fear that she will team up with Jan Fabre and kill that zeitgeist in some horrible way and sell it as art. Gawd.
On January 19, 2021, someone put that comment on Marie Chouinard’s”body remix” video which I posted in 2010. I want to date this guy.
I was a syndicated Dance Blogger for a while. I was in the top ten and I knew this dance site never read my blog. As Kritina Knief put it , I was a wisenheimer with more f-bombs in my mouth than teeth. Of course, I was (and am) very focused on Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps choreography. It was my only field of solid amateur-not-really-knowing-what-I-am-talking -about expertise.. And with all that going for me I went after the Rite of Spring choreographers full force. Didn’t matter how much juice they had. I just kicked the door in because a caustic asshole with little knowledge but a lot of Adderall will do those things. Most of the time it turned out I was just kicking in bathrooom doors, but still.
(Uwe Sholz’ Rite of Spring)Uwe Scholz’ company wrote to me and asked that I take down a review of his garbage version of “Le Sacre du Printemps”. I said no. I would not. Suddenly there was a blogger calling me a hack and a philistine and then BOOM. My readers tripled. And I learned what philistine meant and I agreed with them. So thanks German jerks.
(I can not believe this Kenneth Macmillan nightmare is still performed) “Selling ballet one f-bomb at a time” is the truth and was my tagline forever. It is who I am and what I have done. I think I am going to have to go back to my roots.
You see, I wanted people who were curious about dance but felt intimidated by “real” dance websites to have a place to go. A place to see some dance videos on a YouTube channel read the hilarious explanations that went along with them and talk about it and ask questions and inevitably get to a blog post called “Fucking Russians”, I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote about dance in the tone of a belligerent bar whore being shut off . I used some unorthodox methods here. I posted Marie Chouinard’s “body remix -goldberg variations” (which now has over 1 million views ffs) and this perverted shibari performance video right along side the 1987 Joffrey Le Sacre to see if the visiting perverts would be intrigued, watch it and make a comment. It didn’t matter what they said.
When a guy posts “that lady at 4:22 is fucking gay” it means he watched at least 4 minutes of Nijinsky. Probably NEEDED only 4 minutes of the other stuff. I reference that guy all the time. And I get the same excitement today when someone comments and engages. It happened this morning. The day before too., I ended up with over 8,000 YouTube subscribers and nearly 2 million views of the 1987 Joffrey and over 1,000 comments with at least three per week . I got lucky with this blog, then I abandoned and my style as I began meeting/ engaging with the “real people” of Nijinsky’s masterpiece. YES, I began the Sacre collections and no, ballerinas in Finland and Portugal don’t get the jokes here but they don’t read it anyway.
I was in syndication as a dance writer because I swore a lot and lured people in with sex. Sex of the “chicks with polio and taped nipples “variety . And so it’s the kids who comment and end up here that fueled this ridiculous train. I hope they will take me back. Who is doing the most perverted choreography at the moment? I need to post it next the Le Sacre du Printemps. Try and sell a bridge.
Who is Heather Aagard? She was the catalyst for the Chosen One Collections, for this ongoing search to find every dancer who stepped into that Circle and danced herself to death.
She was given the opportunity only once by the Joffrey Ballet and it changed her life. But there would be no photo no program no listing. I have found these things for almost everyone because of her but not for her .
Dancer #5 in your companies, nothing but a blurry photo for posterity, unknown in history but you, dear “Firsts”, are eternal. You are the dancers who actually created The Chosen One.
The emotional breakdown of being made to dance yourself to your own death did not yet exist.
The steps, yes. The concept, yes. But that was all.
And so when you performed you were flying blind. Each night, with that first jump, you were fleshing out the Sacrificed Virgin. It is you, the dancers not worth filming, the girls in the chorus who are responsible for creating that crucial element that has solidified Le Sacre du Printemps for all time: the Chosen One’s desperate struggle. The theoretical character existed through and was nurtured by Hodson and Archer and generously of course.
But ultimately you, all alone in Roerich’s dark libretto against Stravinsky’s frenetic Rite and Nijinsky’s choreographic “fuck you” to ballet would have to present the torture of the Chosen One and it would have to come from within your own selves.
Her struggle to survive would have to come from your own struggles. Her fear, anxiety, confusion, resistance and abandon – all within the difficulty of that performance – would have to be yours. In the moment, swimming in your own painful experiences on stage before an audience looking for Le Sacre du Printemps,YOU, the under-valued, seldom thought of dancer, were breathing life and death into the Chosen One.
In the Spanish Inquisition of solos.
You are the “all-in Ballerinas” – the ones who pushed through the slow shock and growing momentum of that solo, creating something that would set the pace for the dancers to come and the expectation of audiences forever. You were creating the most important aspect of the Chosen One through the sacrifice of your own pain. You were the groundbreakers. And groundbreakers are not likely to be recognized in their own time.
Just ask Nijinsky.
You were bearing a mighty responsibility in the silence while those around you carried nothing in the celebrations. One internal experience, one performance at a time, you created the great role that the great dancers would not perform.
Those few early clips and photos I have found are a fury of intensity. And as I have poured over your photos and performances, each time there is something new and something new then something else. I don’t think anything like this will ever happen again. I don’t. Do you?
Cristian Maciel wears a haughty expression in the Mystic Circle. “I will not be intimidated”. She dies anyway.
This shot of Anabel Segura…CNB put no names to their company photos – had to get it from other dancers…is raw with agony and this deep torture that looks like it is tearing through her.
As it tore through Susanna. Alba. Nina. Katja. Renata. One by one, you poured yourself into this great and painful process until at last The Chosen One truly existed.
I get pissed off when I see a company or soloist going through the motions, walking to their marks without any idea of what’s happening and probably not interested in learning (see any Mariinsky Act One performance).
It’s been 30 years and for them it is not a new thing, its impact is lost, it is just another ballet, what time is the party? Soloists stroll through the steps fraught with your emotional experiences with blank faces or feigned suffering. It’s a ballet. An obligation. There are steps which exhaust you and then it’s over and let’s take some selfies or whatever.
But for you…for you, Le Sacre du Printemps was not an obligation but a deep invitation that only you could hear and would you take that chance?. It’s your own journey through your own dark night. With your toes turned in.
One “forgotten” told me she cried while dancing, overwhelmed by her own past. Another told me it was an out-of-body experience. And another said it was so cathartic that she didn’t need a photo, she will always have that moment of her single performance.
These women have no photos.
And some of the “firsts and forgottens” don’t care at all which leaves me to conclude they didn’t contribute a thing to the creation of this tragic ballet heroine anyway.
I look at Elizabeth Lopez at the end of the solo, coming out of those few turns throwing her head back, her arms into a sharp punctuating position with an exactness I don’t see anywhere. And at the point of physical exhaustion in the performance! It is her signature. Some dancer somewhere has used it but has no idea who Elizabeth is.
Beatriz Rodriguez is still getting 2 feet from the stage in the last leaps as if she’s spring loaded. It is amazing! And through out her performance – I don’t know what was behind it – but her mouth would be open as if she were crying out in madness which would make sense for the character but in that very first performance? That was from her own world, her own small space. And has been mimmicked but seldom felt.
As the center, as the pinnacle, as the point of the thing you were each presenting this EVENT to the world. You suffered Le Sacre du Printemps and it is everlasting even if it is by way of Pavlenko doing Straccamore .
Today they perform the intense role of your emotional sacrifice. They get the luck of performing something with a blueprint, but not the privilege of creating it.
Feeling it.
And owning it.
Today it is not likely that this photo above of would be identified as Ana Lacerda despite her success.
Today, I will have at least one comment on my Youtube channel on the 1987 Joffrey video; people seeing it for the first time, freaking out, asking questions and I can draw a direct line from that comment on Beatriz’ first contribution to Alba Tapia’s last but I can’t show it because of shitty companies who did not understand the historical significance of debuting Le Sacre and the privilege of having dancers who would dare to perform it.
The students and viewers on YouTube will never see your Firsts, those who should be remembered as the owners of The Chosen One.
For that dreadful act, YOU should be remembered.
Heather Aagard
I might poke a stick at this for a bit. You might get what you want out of me then disappear. You might share something of yourself with us which is Nijinsky. After all – that’s who we are,
I am asked regularly by my awesome Commenters (I consider them mine. We, all 2,000 philistines have been rocking the 87 Joffrey on YouTube for 7 years. Other than breathing, I have done nothing that long).
Already off track.
I am asked “what is this about other than scaring people”. “is this fake or like real mythology”. “so what’s the story behind this. I heard everyone hated Stravinsky.”
Shit, what happened to that post from 2010! Nearly 6,000 people read it: a soup to nuts on Le Sacre. Probably full of inaccuracies but I assure you, I made up for it in drama and emotion. I was in a trance over Le Sacre du Printemps, the Nijinsky choreography as RECOVERED by Hodson,Archer, Robert Joffrey. Take that you bitchy prima from _________. Sending me a note to be careful with my wording: it is a reconstruction.
I wanted to say “is this because you were a horrible Chosen One. Bitch.
Ok…This was supposed to be simple facts for new Commenters and I am off the rails in the first 5 minutes on the keyboard.
Ready, Steady, Go!
1. Vaslav Nijinsky was the darling of the Russian Imperial Ballet, famous world round for his leaps. Nijinsky could dunk a basketball from a standing position. Not really., Basketball didn’t exist yet.
2. The “Impresario” Serge Diaghilev, in love with Nijinsky or the fame he would bring his Ballet Russes, steals the whole Russian company (almost) and, with Stravinsky whom Diaghilev recognized as a genius, throws a MASSIVE (fire) BIRD at Russia.
3. Stravinsky has great success with “The Firebird”, not asking much yet of the ear of Parisian aristocracy. It was tricky and a little advanced for people who only like “ec ta ta”…but there were tutu’s so it was ok.
4. Nijinsky leaps through one traditional ballet after another, sleeping with Diaghilev though who was using who we will never know. Something tells me they didn’t even know.
5: NOW COMS Petrushka. Nijinsky is the star of Stravinsky’s ballet. The Maestro does not like him and this photo is A PROMO SHOT not an indication of a relationship. (Stravinsky would not accept that Nijinsky understood his music or created something brilliant until 1961)
HOWEVER…in his later years he ” would tell stories of how Nijinsky inspired him. Look:
6: Nijinsky is given a shot at his own choreography by his boyfriend the “Impresario Diaghilev”. It is completely odd, bodies bent in the opposite direction of traditional ballet, a strange libretto with an end that implies masturbation. Set to Debussy, he got away with it. It was called L’apre midi d’u n faune” (this small clip of Pietragalla and Charles Jude is near perfect). His next choreography would ruin him and solidify Stravinsky as one of the greatest composers in history.
7. Nicholas Roerich writes a libretto of Russian Pagans who must sacrifice a virgin each year to a Sun Dude named Jarillo who will give them the energy of the sun and they can stomp it into the earth and plants will grow and they will not starve. Of course, he wants a virgin who will have to oddly sacrifice herself! Which is why they “glorify her” . The young maidens choose the virgin which boils down to “who do we hate”.! That circle would be a fist fight were I Chosen.’
The Sacrifice jumps herself to death. Over 135 leaps in under 5 minutes – these dancers an elite group and don’t go looking for any “Ekaterinas”.
She dances herself to death – watch the Joffrey’s Beatriz Rodriguez before anything else. She dances herself to death with something like 139 leaps in less than 5 minutes.
8. Nijinsky uses 50 performers and treats them as soloists in groups of 5 or 6 (I got that from Millicent Hodson – the most enlightened and patient choreographer/woman I have ever met). But man, this is something too new for 1913. He magnifies the ever changing Rite of Spring by finding a way for each “group of soloists” to represent the 100 instruments playing in the pit. But most importantly he stuck to the libretto. Nijinsky was later diagnosed a schizophrenic. It is thought the illness broke during his choreography. I don’t buy it.
8. A so called “Riot” ensues. Nijinsky’s ballet is performed 9 times and lost for 80 years. It was his masterpiece and he was denied the acknowledgment. He is sent on tour during which time he marries a woman and Diaghilev kicks him out of the ballet in a jealous fit.
9. Nijinsky’s career ends within ten or so years. His wife and child watch him take n away, institutionalized for the rest of his life.
10. HORRIBLE choreographies, maybe 30 are set to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. They were ridiculously stupid, and I have lambasted each one somewhere in this blog, with the exception of Tero Saarinen’s interpretation; the first multi-media performance I ever saw.
11. Robert Joffrey has dance historian Millicent Hodson begin a restoration of Nijinsky’s hidden ballet. She meets and marries Kenneth Archer, himself an archeologist if art and historian at the top of his profession. Because of Dr. Archer, we learn about Nicholas Roerich: a huge clue to Le Sacre du Printemps.
12. A decade passes, Robert Joffrey’s cancer pushed into stage 4, Nijinsky stepped it up for his Champion and is resurrected. The Joffrey Ballet performs it for the world, an unknown dancer named Beatriz Rodriguez played The Chosen One a terrifying and nearly unbearable solo: dancing herself to death. The corp de ballet is transfigured, I dare you to find someone not plugged in. Robert Joffrey dies months after the debut, his long search for Nijinsky complete.
13. The ballet world changes.
14. The Nijinsky Inheritanceis left to The Joffrey who saved him and his ballet from a certain death.
le sacre du printemps: the collections 
