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?
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.
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.
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,
It is the only authentic Nijinsky choreography that exists. No matter what they say in France : home of the people who ruined Nijinsky on May 29, 1913.
I had been waxing ridiculous for years on my blogspot “This Is Not Swan Lake” for a bit. I pretty much only had the capacity to emo blog and a good solid knowledge of the Rite because my Dad showed me how to work the reel to reel (then he left me with Stravinsky and a bunch of Mothers of Invention reels and no supervision. At 8. Your questions are now all answered.).
Somehow my blog became syndicated and being the only person with the Joffrey original performance on YouTube (I have no memory of getting that) I got popular. There is no way this collective ever looked at my b log whose tag line was “selling ballet in barrooms one F-Bomb at a time”.
Anyway this syndication fell apart and it collided oddly at the same time that I reached my zenith with body dysmorphia. I was almost at 95 lb and you don’t get those jutting bones by “cutting down carbs”. You gotta own it.
So I stopped writing about the ballet and got Olympic level busy with self-destruction and all that crap and then, you know, they open a Sonic and then you find out you’re really good at making pie crust and well well, here we are.
But I needed to learn more about the ballet and so I had to communicate with Hodson and Archer. I could have written a letter. But I chose to go full jailhouse with Millicent.
I turned my blog into prison and Millicent Hodson was the baddest bitch there so I went at her and punched her in the face. She would naturally kick my ass but at least I would make a name for myself by going to the Top Dog and getting it over with .
Essentially I just wrote a couple of posts really denigrating her. And she contacted me and told me to stop referring to myself as a Philistine ( I did it a lot).
That explains very succinctly her level of commitment to preserving this ballet.
She and Kenneth are so invested that their hearts are able to see past stupid pony tricks like I pulled and so they let me draw them in and ask them questions . In fact look what they gave m dwhich allowed me to begin a digital archive of the dancers – how had that not been done? I mean who wouldn’t want to infect 2 laptops with viruses while searching for dancers all over the globe?
Is it possible I am remembering it wrong? I don’t know but it’s a good story right?
Part Two to come based on readership so that’s the end.
le sacre du printemps: the collections 