Wow, so this work — so revolutionary and controversial, so strange and exciting — has seeped into our culture enough to reach the comics! But then, it already appeared in Disney’s “Fantasia” in 1940; if you have ever seen it you may remember the episode of the battle of the tyrannosaur and the stegosaurus.
The famous riot at the 1913 premiere was as much for Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography as for Stravinsky’s powerful music. Some years ago the original performance was reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and performed by the Joffrey Ballet for a PBS “Dance in America” special titled “In Search of Nijinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’”.
You can find poor-quality off-air extracts of the show on YouTube and get a taste of how off-putting it was for the Parisian audience that expected dainty ballerinas in tutus but got shaggy prehistoric Russians stomping to Stravinsky’s fractured rhythms. And when I first saw the TV special I was as horrified as those Parisians must have been to see that the Chosen One is selected for her sacrificial dance by the other girls of the tribe. Powerful stuff.
For fans of this sort of thing, I highly recommend the DVD “Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes” which includes (along with a reconstructed “Firebird”) the Nijinsky/Hodson version of “Rite” performed by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and Ballet, conducted by Valery (in Russia that’s a man’s name) Gergiev. A must for any other “Rite” fanatics out there.
Wow, so this work — so revolutionary and controversial, so strange and exciting — has seeped into our culture enough to reach the comics! But then, it already appeared in Disney’s “Fantasia” in 1940; if you have ever seen it you may remember the episode of the battle of the tyrannosaur and the stegosaurus.
The famous riot at the 1913 premiere was as much for Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography as for Stravinsky’s powerful music. Some years ago the original performance was reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and performed by the Joffrey Ballet for a PBS “Dance in America” special titled “In Search of Nijinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’”.
You can find poor-quality off-air extracts of the show on YouTube and get a taste of how off-putting it was for the Parisian audience that expected dainty ballerinas in tutus but got shaggy prehistoric Russians stomping to Stravinsky’s fractured rhythms. And when I first saw the TV special I was as horrified as those Parisians must have been to see that the Chosen One is selected for her sacrificial dance by the other girls of the tribe. Powerful stuff.
For fans of this sort of thing, I highly recommend the DVD “Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes” which includes (along with a reconstructed “Firebird”) the Nijinsky/Hodson version of “Rite” performed by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and Ballet, conducted by Valery (in Russia that’s a man’s name) Gergiev. A must for any other “Rite” fanatics out there.