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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
