Behind this captivation with the other was a belief in the Free Essay Example

Behind this captivation with the “other” was a belief in the intrinsic goodness of all humankind, a conviction inspired by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the “Noble Savage”. The discovery of African tribal art by Pablo Picasso around 1906 was an important influence on his painting as well as a major factor in leading him to Cubism. Primitivism also means the search for a simpler way of life away from Western urban sophistication, industrialization, spectacle and social restrictions. The classic example of this is artist Paul Gauguin’s move from Paris to Tahiti in the South Pacific in 1891.

Modern artists valued tribal arts especially for it intensity and directness of emotional expression which they considered more important than the technique employed to create the object. Moreover, Parisian audience was hungry for the exotic escapism and Diaghilev’s Les Ballet Russes could provide it. Diaghilev understood that Parisians wished to be transported into foreign worlds.

Exoticism was also inherent in Russian culture. Prior to WWI the Russian Empire stretched from the North Pole to the borders of the Ottoman Empire in the south, and from the Pacific to the borders of the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, with St.

Petersburg as its “window” into Europe. Foreign elements have been incorporated into Russian culture since the days of the imperial conquests of the Ottoman territories. The Caucasus was introduced through the literary works of Pushkin and Lermontov in the nineteenth century. The legends of the Orient, like the stories of 1001 Nights, were as familiar as the Russian folkloric tales.

As a result, Russia appeared even more exotic to the Western Europe.

However, The Rite of Spring was not the first production when Les Ballets Russes created a ballet based on Russian culture and traditions; it had been preceded by The Firebird and Petrushka. While The Firebird provided synthetic representation of Russian folklore and Petrushka offered an interpretation of St Petersburg street culture, The Rite of Spring aimed for a pure and authentic evocation of the deepest layers of Russian history, a goal captured in its’ subtitle “Pictures of Pagan Russia,” the scenario depicts various primitive rituals celebrating the advent of spring, after which a young girl is chosen as a sacrificial victim and dances herself to death. The story line is based on pagan myths and lacks a specific plot or narrative, and can be considered as a succession of choreographed episodes. Lawrence Morton has argued that the idea of pagan sacrifice in The Rite of Spring may have been in part inspired by Stravinsky’s reading of Sergei Gorodetsky’s poem Yarila as the composer previously set two of Gorodetsky poems in Yar to music as “Two Melodies of Gorodetsky” (1907-08), opus 6. Yarila is a Slavic version of god Dionysus, a pagan deity who required annual life taking as proof of nature’s powers of resurrection. The first part of the work is called “Adoration of the Earth” and consists of games and ritual dances interrupted by a procession of sages, culminating in a frenzied dance as the people embrace the spring. Part Two, “The Sacrifice” has a darker aspect with the secret night games of maidens, leading to the choice of one for sacrifice and her eventual dance to the death before the sages.

An important influence on this vision was the work of the ballet’s set and costume designer Nicholas Roerich who had long-standing ties to Maria Tenisheva and Talashkino enterprise, an artistic colony near the city of Smolensk with the objective to create a “genuine Russian style.” Trained as an artist, Roerich was a serious student of ethnography and archaeology and in the 1890s he became grossly involved in research on Slavic architecture, participating in archaeological expeditions to some forty ancient Russian cities and these interests led him to Talashkino.” In his d?cors and costumes for The Rite of Spring, Roerich used his knowledge of Russian ethnography and archaeology and artistic talent to create costumes and stage sets evoking Slavic pagan rituals.

The stage sets as described by Roerich himself aimed to present a number of pictures of earthly joy and celestial triumph, as understood by the Slavs. The first set was supposed to transport the audience to the foot of a sacred hill, in a lush plain where Slavonic tribes were gathered to celebrate the spring rites. In this scene, there is an old witch, who predicts the future, a marriage by capture and round dances. Then comes the most solemn moment. The wisest ancient is brought from the village to imprint his sacred kiss on the new-flowering earth. During this rite the crowd is seized with a mystic terror·After this uprush of the celestial joy, the second scene sets a celestial mystery before the audience. Young virgins dance in circles on the sacred hill, amid enchanted rocks, and then they choose the victim they intend to honour. In a moment she will dance her last dance, before the ancient men, wrapped in bearskin, to show that the man was man’s ancestor. Then the greybeards dedicate the victim to the god Yarilo.

The costumes were vibrant, exotic and astonishing. Critic Adolphe Boschot wrote after the premier describing the ‘pointed bonnets and bathrobes, animal skins or purple tunics’ worn by the dancers: “Imagine people tricked out in the most garish colours.” Cyril Beaumont reported that the costumes were ‘flaxen and bright scarlet’: “The women wore simple smocks decorated at the hem with simple designs n colour; their legs were wrapped in strips of cloth, cross-gathered and on their feet they wore bast shoes. Their hair was twisted into long, straggling pigtails; their cheeks were crudely dabbed in red. The men wore a shorter smock, similar leg-coverings and I think a pointed cap of some animal skin.”

The costumes were created in a mix of brilliant colours – red, yellow, orange, teal, purple and various other shades. These garments recall a peasant dress where the colours are organized into a series of printed bands, each defined by a contrasting geometric pattern. The tunic dresses are long and tubular made of a single piece suggesting layers of traditional peasant dress – the rubakha chemise and the poneva apron through their printed delineations. The long sleeves also recall a peasant tradition allowing for extra length of fabric so that the sleeves could be pulled over the hands in cold weather. The leather belts at their waists served as anchors for traditional amulets and charms. These costumes were not meant to be realistic reproductions but stylized peasant dresses, streamlined and simplified. On a more critical note, Sarah Woodcock comments in “Ballets Russes Costumes and the Art of Design” that the costumes were impractical in design and dancers were forced to wear them. The women’s shifts were not cotton but fine wool and the men’s were made of thick flannel. All were belted and tended to ride up around the waist. Performing in damp wool under hot lights intensified the dancers’ discomfort on top of Nijinsky’s revolutionary choreography and Stravinsky’s challenging rhythm. She advises for any modern reproduction to find alternative fabrics. Overall, in addition to their evocation of the primitive and pagan traditions, these costumes are especially memorable for their mixture of vibrant colours, minimalist form and geometric decoration.

In the following discussion of the avant-garde choreography of The Rite of Spring, it is first important to note that Les Ballets Russes marked a break from the classical tradition pioneered in Russia by French dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa. White tutus were replaced with vibrant hues and geometric patterns, acrobatic legwork was substituted with exoticism and eroticism and graceful motions gave way to sensuality. Moreover, torsos were freed of their corsets and feet were uncased, a trend introduced a few years earlier by Lo?e Fuller and Isadora Duncan.

Furthermore, Nijinsky’s choreography in The Rite of Spring was seen as a revolt against grace, beauty and the tradition of classical ballet. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche argued that “the classical civilization of Athens was not a triumph of civilization over barbarism. It was rather a synthesis of civilized order with ritual practices which had previously been seen as primitive and barbaric, but which the Greeks incorporated into their civilization” In The Rite of Spring, Nietzsche’s view of modern civilization was translated into the sacrificial dance of the Chosen Maiden, who danced herself to death, similar to the way ancient Dionysian worshippers danced themselves into frenzy. In The Rite of Spring the dancers “trembled, shook, shivered, stamped, jumped crudely and ferociously, circled the stage in wild khorovods. At times the movement approximated the involuntary condition of trance” . Thus, a parallel can be drawn between Picasso’s art and Nijinsky choreography. In the same way that Picasso incorporated primitive forms and masks into his paintings, Nijinsky integrated primitive movement into his ballet thereby using the purely aesthetic form to expose a greater critical awareness.

Furthermore, the dancing was continuously determined by the music. Each change in sound and rhythm was reflected in the varying numbers of the dancers, the colour of their garments, and the intensity of their movements. The red groups would dominate the stage in the passage of horns and trumpets, while violins or flutes carried the sense of white or grey. Nijinsky’s choreography made the music visible. Nijinsky implemented Dalcroze’s idea that every note of any musical theme must be marked with a corresponding movement on the part of the dancer. “This polyrhythmic dancing was illustrated by setting one group of dancers to beat out softly the contrapuntal accompaniment of a theme which was being directly and more forcibly danced by another group.” The device was masterfully used at the end of the first act, where a great circle of women moved to the notes of the main theme, while groups of men within the circles moved in threefold counterpoint.

Stravinsky’s innovative score was strongly rooted in traditional folk motifs as he wanted to capture the violent Russian spring in his music. The composer was attracted by the idea of “reconstructing the mysterious past,” as Benois wrote in his Reminiscences: “·chiefly because it gave him free space in his search for unusual rhythms and sounds. Nothing was really known of the music of those remote days and Stravinsky had the freedom from all the rules and constraints. Diaghilev himself was equally interested in the idea of creating a “primitive” ballet. It satisfied his own “barbarian instincts” and he saw a magnificent opportunity for “shattering” the Parisian audience with something even more shocking than Petrouchka. The new ballet was supposed to contain nothing of European or any known civilization.” Musical analysts have noted a significant grounding in Russian and Lithuanian folk music. Stravinsky acknowledged that the work’s opening bassoon melody was derived from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs but insisted that this was his only borrowing from such sources. According to Scheijen in Diaghilev: A Life: “Stravinsky’s chief innovation was his focus on rhythm, particularly irregular metres, which had rarely been heard in Western music up to that point. Indeed, the metre changes so frequently that the composer himself often had a hard time deciding where to put the bar lines.” Overall, Stravinsky’s score contains many novel features for its time, including experiments in tonality, metre, rhythm, stress and dissonance. It is also important to note that even though the musical score was written for the ballet, the music also achieved great recognition as a concert piece and considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the twentieth century.

As a result, Les Ballets Russes established a reputation for radical innovation in art, music and dance. Their stage emerged as a central place where modernism’s meaning was defined and contested, similar to such avant-garde venues as the Salon d’Autumne and the Salon des Independents. Les Ballets Russes renewed the interest in Gesamtkunstwerk by exploring and testing relationships between visual arts, music and dance. Moreover, their productions also referenced their ties to Parisian modernism, to the “Orient” and the “primitive” and to the classical tradition. Moreover, The Rite of Spring succeeded at reflecting and critiquing the theories and sensibilities of its time and place, while depicting the lives and customs of a pagan community. As many other avant-garde masterpieces, The Rite of Spring was ahead of its time and unappreciated by the contemporaries, just like Cubism, it was perceived as ugly and disturbing. However, it left a lasting impression for over a hundred years and can still delight, shock and surprise audiences in the twenty first century.