Can anything be more thrilling than Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring? It has no shaman, but a much deeper understanding of ritual, sacrifice and ritual dance than the Ballet Russe version which shocked the Parisian audience at its premiere on 29 May 1913. The choreography is still close to Nijinsky’s ‘gravity submitting’ original, yet has a more terrifying intensity. The dancing is truly frenzied, each villager ridden by her gods. Women make astounding leaps onto the shoulders of their partners. The music is loud and relentless, with quieter sections offering no respite from the intensity and escalating drama.
Pina Bausch pares away anything inessential, then adds a new emphasis on the tensions between the individual and the community’s need for renewal. The young women are both drawn to and repelled by the possibility of becoming the chosen one, passing the red dress like a parcel in some terrifying party game. Where Diaghilev had archetypal peasants, in the Bausch version each dancer is differentiated, with her own personality, hopes and fears. There are even moments of humour, eliciting a laugh from some in the audience. The men are peripheral, yet controlling. At times they are menacing presences, ensuring the ritual will be completed, yet they are also recognisably human, involved in relationships and fearful that their partner will be chosen.
The ‘performance’ is preceded by stagehands spilling and spreading peat across the floor. From a Brechtian perspective this would be form of distanciation, reminding the audience that they are in the theatre, watching a product, disrupting that suspension of disbelief that had always been deemed essential. But this slow raking of peat is not a prelude, a glimpse into the work that enables the performance to take place, but the beginning of a ritual that exceeds the theatrical rite of the title. The element of earth is literally present. The dancers become more and more stained by it. Rehearsal director Jo Ann Endicott, who worked with Bausch on this and other productions, identified a necessity for the movements ‘to be earthy’[i]. It’s ‘earthy’ in every way. This isn’t a projection onto a ‘primitive’ or distant society, this is about the drives we all share, that desperation for renewal and continuation of life. The rite is accompanied by explicit sexuality. Couples are energetically, and somewhat frantically, procreating. This isn’t a universe of comforting rhythms and cycles. Debussy criticised the music as ‘chilly pictograms of violence’[ii], and it does have a ruthlessness that both chills and thrills.
The audience are implicated in the ritual. We too are dependent on earth and the renewal of Spring for our survival. We need crops to grow and children to be born. Like the villagers, we have no idea who will be chosen. In the traditional versions, I can always spot who will take this role, although I don’t know if this is signalled in the choreography or some star quality in the dancer. With Bausch, I fear for each dancer. Each seems too fragile or too engaging to be sacrificed.
The chosen one’s dance is extremely poignant. She never enters a trance state, so seems as if forcing her limbs to move, her body to keep dancing. She accepts her fate, but is in a state of terror rather than submission. In the Diaghilev version, the dancers surround the chosen one; here she is fully exposed to the audience, in flimsy red dress, with one poignantly bare breast. The audience completes the circle. The end is abrupt, leaving us stunned at our complicity in what Stravinsky called ‘the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring’.[iii]
[i]Cited by Sara Crompton in article in ENB’s She Persisted programme.
[ii]Cited in Untwisting the Serpent Daniel Albright UCP
[iii]https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp-medieval-modern/chapter/stravinskys-the-rite-of-spring/
Pina Bausch pares away anything inessential, then adds a new emphasis on the tensions between the individual and the community’s need for renewal. The young women are both drawn to and repelled by the possibility of becoming the chosen one, passing the red dress like a parcel in some terrifying party game. Where Diaghilev had archetypal peasants, in the Bausch version each dancer is differentiated, with her own personality, hopes and fears. There are even moments of humour, eliciting a laugh from some in the audience. The men are peripheral, yet controlling. At times they are menacing presences, ensuring the ritual will be completed, yet they are also recognisably human, involved in relationships and fearful that their partner will be chosen.
The ‘performance’ is preceded by stagehands spilling and spreading peat across the floor. From a Brechtian perspective this would be form of distanciation, reminding the audience that they are in the theatre, watching a product, disrupting that suspension of disbelief that had always been deemed essential. But this slow raking of peat is not a prelude, a glimpse into the work that enables the performance to take place, but the beginning of a ritual that exceeds the theatrical rite of the title. The element of earth is literally present. The dancers become more and more stained by it. Rehearsal director Jo Ann Endicott, who worked with Bausch on this and other productions, identified a necessity for the movements ‘to be earthy’[i]. It’s ‘earthy’ in every way. This isn’t a projection onto a ‘primitive’ or distant society, this is about the drives we all share, that desperation for renewal and continuation of life. The rite is accompanied by explicit sexuality. Couples are energetically, and somewhat frantically, procreating. This isn’t a universe of comforting rhythms and cycles. Debussy criticised the music as ‘chilly pictograms of violence’[ii], and it does have a ruthlessness that both chills and thrills.
The audience are implicated in the ritual. We too are dependent on earth and the renewal of Spring for our survival. We need crops to grow and children to be born. Like the villagers, we have no idea who will be chosen. In the traditional versions, I can always spot who will take this role, although I don’t know if this is signalled in the choreography or some star quality in the dancer. With Bausch, I fear for each dancer. Each seems too fragile or too engaging to be sacrificed.
The chosen one’s dance is extremely poignant. She never enters a trance state, so seems as if forcing her limbs to move, her body to keep dancing. She accepts her fate, but is in a state of terror rather than submission. In the Diaghilev version, the dancers surround the chosen one; here she is fully exposed to the audience, in flimsy red dress, with one poignantly bare breast. The audience completes the circle. The end is abrupt, leaving us stunned at our complicity in what Stravinsky called ‘the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring’.[iii]
[i]Cited by Sara Crompton in article in ENB’s She Persisted programme.
[ii]Cited in Untwisting the Serpent Daniel Albright UCP
[iii]https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicapp-medieval-modern/chapter/stravinskys-the-rite-of-spring/