Or how to turn your toes in and your back on Swan Lake
It was a long time ago when I began a Blogger Called This Is Not Swan Lake (igorandmore was the link as I was quite devoted to Stravinsky and just tuning in to The Recovery of Le Sacre du Printemps). BTW…I will never call it a reconstruction.
RECONSTRUCTION: a thing that has been rebuilt after being damaged or destroyed. plural noun: reconstructions.
RECOVERED: find or regain possession of something stolen or lost.
Le Sacre du Printemps was both stolen and lost and by definition later recovered by Robert Joffrey, Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. So suck it.
I’ve played that ecovered tune from the rooftops – and the gutters – on an old violin that turned out to be worth a fortune. I had no idea that I would become the “digital archivist” of Sacre. This is a humbling term given to me by Millicent Hodson. But really…what the hell? Why was nobody documenting this ballet? I became obsessive and at the same time I had insomnia and for some reason I was prescribed a pill that kept you awake.
You can’t get that anymore. It was a big pharmaceutical fuck up. Of course it wasn’t the “stay awake awesome have fun type of thing” it was more the “stay awake what’s wrong with me why can’t I sleep oh my God what am I going to do what am I going to do I’ll keep myself busy by looking up Stravinsky stuff.”
That was actually on the label.
And so it was there in those rolling time zones that I bumped into people and situations that would change my life in ways I could never imagine. From the ballet’s champion Millicent Hodson to 2 rude English ballerinas to the remarkable Marie Stravinsky to the Chosen One warriors like Ana Lacerda Alba Tapia Priscilla Albuquerque and Gaia Straccamore and then to dancers like my friend in FInland Kirsi Tiilharjua to Anna Simondi of Zurich and the entire archive catalyst Heather Aagard who, all 3 together, were criminally not photographed in the most difficult solo in dance…from all of that and thanks to them I became the finest version of myself. I had something to be truly and quietly proud of.
I don’t believe they know this. They changed my life. And from there, I would do the same.
My old blog tagline was “selling ballet one f-bomb at a time” and somehow I ended up becoming syndicated in a rotation of ballet sites back in 2008. I was in the top 10 which proves you can indeed sell ballet with f-bombs.
My Youtube channel contained the only video of the 1987 Joffrey debut of Nijinsky’s recovered ballet and the place music theory students had to go in a Stravinsky course. It was amazing to watch commenters learn something from me then teach the same thing 3 comments later to another. See?
“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…
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.
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 
