Tanztheater Wuppertal, by Ullli Weiss
Like many a vacuous pop tart, The Rite of Spring was first put on my cultural radar in a significant way via the Pet Shop Boys.
‘I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing’ was – thanks to several 12 inch remixes that became an integral part of a punishingly heavy flight case full of vinyl that I was lugging around London nightclubs in 1994 – the first Pet Shop Boys song I actually liked. It was infectious. It was immense fun to spin around a dance floor to. And it contained the line: “I feel like taking all my clothes off, and dancing to The Rite of Spring.”
It would become apparent to me why Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe – postmodern scavengers of all things hip, from Derek Jarman’s Super 8 cinema to the inflatable waistcoats on sale in Michiko Koshino opposite the Anthony d’Offay gallery – had dropped the reference. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring – which turns 100 this year – is a key work of art that, like James Joyce’s Ulysses, signals the birth of modernism. It was aggressive, uncompromising. It was pagan. It was punk. It was cool before cool, as a concept, existed. No wonder that Michael Clark – better known for his work with Leigh Bowery and The Fall – devoted so many years to creating his three-part Stravinsky Project: O, Mmm… and I Do, putting The Sex Pistols and T Rex occasionally into the mix.
It was pagan. It was punk. It was cool before cool, as a concept, existed
The Rite of Spring was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29th May, 1913. War was in the air, the Russian Revolution was around the corner and Paris itself was a hotbed of artistic bohemia. Absinthe had yet to be made illegal. Everyone was at it. And yet, when Stravinsky raised the curtain on Nijinsky’s savage, tribal choreography, accompanied by his own even more confrontational, occasionally nightmarish score mixed with Lithuanian folk riffs, it was shocking, even to the avant-garde. The police were called to calm the crowd. Of the many things written about that night, my favourite anecdote involves Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russes trying to distract the audience from rioting by dashing to the wings of the stage and flicking the lights on and off.
Tanztheater Wuppertal, by Zerrin Aydin Herwegh
100 years on, and the same theatre in Paris has been staging revivals of the work, most notably and recently Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Frühlingsopfer, debuted by Pina Bausch in Berlin in 1977. It is right and fitting that this should be one of the most hailed versions of The Rite of Spring of modern times. When I saw this produced some years ago at Sadler’s Wells, the audience rose as one when the house lights went up and took part in a thunderous standing ovation, the like of which I’d never witnessed before. Stravinsky’s work still, it seemed, had the power to stir in a radical way. When shaped by the right hands.
When I saw the show in Paris as part of its four-night engagement in June to mark the centenary of Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s original, things ended somewhat differently. There was the same show as ever: the stage covered, arrestingly, with soil, the men bare chested in wide legged black trousers and the women in “nude” coloured shift dresses. There were the tightly choreographed pack moves and the crazed primal circles of pagan madness, the gyrating filthy bodies, the panic and the terror. In Bausch’s hands, The Rite of Spring isn’t so much a dance, as an incarnation and an episode of violent release. Even if the score itself has lost much of its power after decades spent echoing through Hollywood horror films and Disney, Pina Bausch’s interpretation of it is as nightmarish as it is beautiful. It takes its audience to an extraordinary, deeply unsettling but thrilling place.
There were the tightly choreographed pack moves and the crazed primal circles of pagan madness, the gyrating filthy bodies, the panic and the terror
And yet, at the end of the evening, there wasn’t anything like the standing ovation that I’d seen in London. And it was obvious why: To pad out the evening, an interval had been added to a one-act piece of work and, before it, a 45 minute one-camera film of Bausch rehearsing the finale with her soloist was screened. The novelty of seeing a chain-smoking Bausch in what appeared to be an Amelia Earhart flying hat and Wellington boots in a rehearsal room wore off rapidly. As a modernist self-reflexive exercise, it could have been powerful: I was expecting the grain of the vintage celluloid and flicker of the projector to fade to black and then for the screen to be raised on the otherworldly glow of the performance itself. Instead, on it went. And on. And on. Interminably on.
Finally, the credits appeared, there was a feeble round of applause, and the stagehands came on, with the curtain up, to spread the soil for The Rite of Spring around the stage in a perfect square. Again – here were the nuts and bolts of production that may be interesting in certain ways in of themselves, but which would detract profoundly from the performance as a whole.
Modernism is still a very valid movement and school of practice. There is modernist furniture, fashion and cooking. 100 years on, what does modernism mean? This evening at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées brought up some interesting questions. As modernists, we’re supposed to appreciate the materials of a work as much as the work itself. But sometimes, it’s difficult to care. And sometimes, it just puts you in a really bad mood. The white walls of Fergus Henderson’s St John in London make for an arresting modernist environment for dining, but the kitchen doesn’t make you watch your pig being slaughtered or cooked before you eat it. Instead, there’s a wine list to look at.
At the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées I was reminded of going to a chapel in New York some years ago to see Tacita Dean’s Craneway Event, her film of Merce Cunningham rehearsing with his dancers at a spectacularly decrepit glass walled abandoned car factory in California in 2008. There were truly wonderful visual moments, but the film belonged in an art gallery, to be seen in glimpses and twenty minute bursts, not in one punishing 108 minute viewing. A third of the audience left, but I stayed the distance, and then for weeks wondered why. Why should art be an endurance test? And why would I have felt a cultural fraud for leaving the room?
Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring is a thrilling piece of work, perhaps the most thrilling piece of dance of the last 100 years. While not quite an outrage, perhaps, it’s a shame that it had some of its magic removed by its style of presentation in Paris.
Sometimes boredom can be a valid creative tool. Goodness knows Bausch herself tested the endurance of her audiences at times. But sometimes it just saps the will to live. And one wonders how Bausch would have felt about this staging. Modernism was radical and energising 100 years ago. There’s no reason why it can’t be today.