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Sunday, March 20, 2016

Equinoxious




Monsieur Bouffant has posted the last bit of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring performed on a computer as an offering for the season, but complained, "Where are the virgins?" So I found some.

Not the usual attempt to present the work as some kind of almost conventional ballet, this is the lost original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky as reconstructed from documentary evidence and staged by Nicholas Roerich, and it doesn't look like anything else ever. I saw it in New York sometime in the early 90s and I have to say I thought it was too weird, though I really love the music. Cheap seats a mile from the stage, of course, in what is now the (ew!) David Koch Theater, so it was pretty hard to tell what was going on. It looked like a Russian primitive aerobics class where one of the students dies at the end.

Do at least watch through the credits. If you want for contrast something more contemporary looking, there's a complete version of the Pina Bausch, but I've only watched a (stunning) extract.

Now I think the 1913 choreography is exceptionally cool. I love YouTube!

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