The Rite of Spring
米利森特 • 哈德森 | Millicent HODSON
The Rite of Spring
1987
Positive film installation
Dimensions Variable
Courtesy of the artist
This original ritual version of “The Rite of Spring” was created by Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, choreographer, Vaslav Nijinsky, and scenarist and designer, Nicholas Roerich. Nijinsky pushed the limits of traditional ballet with his creative choreography, where the dancers' energy and shapes are contained, but sometimes implode or explode. Finally, the chosen sacrificial girl danced herself to death. Classical ballet is often seen as dancing upwards against gravity, whereas Nijinsky’s dancers showed disconnected movements and fell down on earth. His dance completely rejects ballet’s aesthetics of lightness and gracefulness. In this work, the dancers repeatedly used their upper bodies to create expanded gestures with their extended arms. The wooden, stone-like postures of the dancers are modernist sculptures for the body. They used their arms, torsos, and heads to form dramatic movements to create a scene, where they dance in a circle as in a Russian ritual.
Note: The version on view is a 1987 reconstruction of Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” by Millicent Hodson and was performed by the Joffrey Ballet.
Artist description
Millicent HODSON (choreographer, dance historian, graphic artist) and Kenneth ARCHER (scenic consultant, art historian) are a dance and design team based in London. For three decades they have reconstructed lost ballets and created original works through Ballets Old & New, staging them at such companies as the Joffrey Ballet, Paris Opera, Mariinsky Ballet, and many other companies. They lecture and give workshops worldwide, write books and articles and exhibit drawings from all their ballets. The Lost Rite (2014), with photographs by Shira Klasmer, was printed in Russian (2015) by the Vaganova Academy. Archer wrote “Roerich East and West” (Parkstone, English/French, 1999) and Hodson her monographs on Nijinsky’s ”Le Sacre du Printemps” and “Jeux” (Pendragon,1996, 2008). For “The Rite of Spring at 100” (Indiana University, 2017) she contributed an essay and cover drawing. With Elizabeth Kiem’s Trapeze Press, they are publishing a series on reconstructing five early Balanchine ballets.