kvetchlandia:

Nickolas Muray     Mikhail Mordkin, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe Dancer     1922

I spent my entire life training to be a concert pianist so I had to study Les Ballets Russes in detail. Mordkin is a pretty famous dancer, but the Ballet is most associated with Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers of all time, a schizophrenic who died in obscure insanity.

(E.O. Hoppe/Getty Images   Vaslav Nijinsky)

Les Ballets Russes was a ballet company founded by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909; many famous artists have been associated with the ballet, including Anna Pavlova, Peter Tchaikovsky, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Eric Satie, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Coco Chanel.

My favorite story about Les Ballets Russes is the debut of the Rite of Spring. The Ballet tells the story of two primitive Slavic tribes that sacrifice a virgin to the Gods of the spring, and it is the most frightening piece of music I have ever heard. It’s difficult for music to incite and narrate real fear; images and films are much better at it. But the Rite of Spring, with primitive tonalities and rhythms, is scary and violent and dissonant; it sounds like primitive violence unrestrained by centuries of corrective civilization. Movement III of Part 2, a section vividly titled ‘Glorification of the Chosen Victim,’ begins with huge booming drums, and the first time I heard it, I imagined warriors and elders and primitive half-men leaping around in a bloodlust frenzy, laughing manically as the victim struggles against her bonds.

Even by today’s standards, its jarring. The choreography is more stomping than graceful leaping, and the dancers are clad not in tutus but in shapeless sackcloth.

The images of pagan Russia, the theme, the primitive harmonies and the heavy grotesque choreography horrified the Paris audience. The crowd eventually rioted, shouting so loudly that the dancers could no longer hear the music. Nijinsky had to shout numbers to them from backstage.

I’m not especially famliar with dance history, but I know The Ballet was enormously influential in that field. And it was equally monumental in music, probably one of the most important pieces of music ever written. Everyone has felt its echoes, whether they know it or not. The Rite of Spring was used in Disney’s Fantasia. And even those who don’t know about the Rite of Spring have heard the music from Star Wars, which was heavily influenced by it. Listen to the music in Episode IV: A New Hope.

(Stravinsky and Nijinsky, 1911. At the premiere of Petrushka.)