7/30/2019 Collins, Brian - Scandal and the Dance Revisited; One Hundred Years After the Rite of Spring

1/2

Sightings March 21, 2013

Collins, Brian - Scandal and the Dance Revisited: One Hundred Years after "The

Rite of Spring"

Brian Collins

This spring marks the centenary of the infamous Paris premiere of Igor Stravinskys balletThe Rite

of Spring, the scene of a music riot that saw young concertgoers primed for modernity coming to

blows with booing members of the old guard. Stravinsky long claimed that his score, derived from

Russian and Lithuanian folk music, drove the crowd into a frenzy. But, as music critic Richard

Turaskin has pointed out, the unamplified orchestra would have been quickly drowned out by the

audiences catcalls and it therefore must have been the intentionally grotesque choreography of

Vaslav Nijinsky, not the music, that provoked the riot.

The man responsible for the costumes at the 1913 premiere was Nicholas Roerich, the artist,

ethnographer, art preservation activist, and reputed guru to US vice president Henry A. Wallace.

Roerich, who died in India in 1947 and devised a school of ethical and mystical practice called Agni

Yoga, collaborated with Stravinsky on the ballet, originally titled Great Sacrifice, from the

beginning, after Stravinsky had a dream or vision of a violent pagan ritual in which a virgin danced

herself to death. Roerich brought his expertise in folklore and religion, along with his interest in the

Perennial Philosophy, to the table, and his attempts to renew the flagging world spirit through an

infusion of Buddhism, Theosophy, and Central Asian shamanism were as much a part of the

creation of The Rite of Springas Stravinskys desire to break with musical tradition.

Like that other masterpiece of modernism, The Waste Land, The Rite of Springattempts to do

something completely new by reaching deep into the past and reconnecting with some kind of

primordial sacred. And in the years since its premiere, the ballet has become synonymous with both

innovation and atavism. Julia Kristeva observes this when she discusses Strabos story of Apolloflaying his rival Marsyas on the tree from which his pipes were made: What I like about the myths

on the origin of music is their cruelty... These legendary acts of barbarism anchor music in an

imaginary sacred, a bit like in The Rite of Spring, in fact, when the virgin is sacrificed.

Marxist curmudgeon Theodor Adorno famously disapproved of the pleasure he observed in the

audience at the virgins frenzied dance to death. He saw the audiences response as both reactionary

and regressive, writing that, if the liquidation of the young girl is not simplistically enjoyed by the

individual in the audience, he feels his way into the collective, thinking (as the potential victim of

the collective) to participate thereby in collective power in a state of magical regression. Even

Stravinskys friend Jean Cocteau had reservations about the ballet having a religious complicity

among its followers, the same hypnotism as at [Wagner's opera house] Bayreuth.Now, one hundred years later, the experience of the violent sacred expressed in The Rite of

Spring seems to have lost its power to fascinate us in quite the same way, much less cause rioting.

Having seen bucolic Brontosauri chewing plants to Stravinskys once-startling score inFantasia,

not to mention watching John Cage, Elvis Presley, and The Sex Pistols break more rules than

Stravinsky could have named, we cannot imagine the 1913 Paris ballet riot except as a scene out of

a Mack Sennet short. It is worth our while then to reflect (as faculty and students at UNC Chapel

Hill have been doing over the last year in a centenary program of courses, lectures, and

performances) on what The Rite means to us today.

Stravinskys vision combines the two seemingly opposing desires to connect with the paradigmatic

past and to exploit new technology (his score was so fast it was nearly impossible for pianists of hisday to play, which is why he wrote it for the automatic pianola). And it is in fact the way in which

those two impulses have become so ingrained in the contemporary worldview that robs The Rite

7/30/2019 Collins, Brian - Scandal and the Dance Revisited; One Hundred Years After the Rite of Spring

2/2

of its punch. Simply, we have grown into Stravisnkys revolutionary work. Dancers and orchestras

can now easily master the score and choreography that once confounded both players and audience

(as did Beethovens Ninth, to which Stravinsky compared his ballet in a fit of modesty) and today,

seeing a precisely executed dissonant ballet about human sacrifice is now about as shocking as, say,

a Jesuit pope from Argentina.

References

Theodor Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music. London: Continuum, 2007.

Catherine Clment and Julia Kristeva. The Feminine and the Sacred. New York:

ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2001.

James Ostereich. Stravinsky and Rite, Rigorously Rethought. The New York Times. October 30,

2012.

Jann Pasler. New Music as Confrontation: The Musical Sources of Cocteaus Identity. In Writing

through Music: Essays on Music, Culture and Politics. Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity

Press, 2008.

Richard Taruskin. Shocker Cools Into a Rite of Passage. The New York Times. September 14,2012.

Pieter C. Van den Toorn. Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring: The Beginnings of a Musical Language.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.

https://www.theriteofspringat100.org/

Brian Collins is a graduate of the Divinity School and the newly appointed Drs. Ram and Sushila

Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. He has written about Charles

Manson and Christian psychedelic rock forSightings and recently reviewed the work of the

electronic band Vatican Shadow and the 2012 horror film Cabin in the Woods forReligious Studies

Review. His monograph Yajnta, the End of Sacrifice: Mimetic Theory and Hindu Myth is due out

from Michigan State University Press later this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/arts/music/reconsidering-stravinsky-and-the-rite-of-spring.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/music/rite-of-spring-cools-into-a-rite-of-passage.html?pagewanted=3&pagewanted=allhttps://www.theriteofspringat100.org/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/arts/music/rite-of-spring-cools-into-a-rite-of-passage.html?pagewanted=3&pagewanted=allhttps://www.theriteofspringat100.org/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/arts/music/reconsidering-stravinsky-and-the-rite-of-spring.html