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.

It will not go away.

-Fatova