Girl Through Glass

An eerie silence comes over the city, as if it remembers how it is to be naked in the night.

I tell them that Nijinsky’s dancers were often in open revolt at his choreography. “He made them use their bodies against every bit of training that they had ever received in the ballet academies of Russia and France. He asked them to betray everything they’d worked for.”

The DVD starts. Here is the opening of Le Sacre—fierce tableaus of people in bearskins and Roman sandals. A set of pointy trees, a round and ruthless sun. Their movements stab and jab and rush along with the thunder and jolt of Stravinsky’s score. Halfway into the piece the group parts and reveals the shimmering awkward girl, the sacrificial lamb. She dances her strange stiff-limbed expressionless solo. Ostensibly it’s the story of the ritual pagan sacrifice of a young woman who dances herself to death, but the choreography tells another story.
She strikes out, scours the stage with extended limbs, pushing back her attackers. She’s not cowering, but filled with rage at her fate. She’s not a lamb at all. At the final discordant climb of the shattering music, the group rushes toward her and raises her high above them, and it feels like a victorious moment. But a victory of what?

Today we’re watching Le Sacre du Printemps. Of course they have already read all about it. They think they know it—Stravinsky’s famous Rite of Spring—of course, everyone knows it. But few have actually seen it.