SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE TO DEATH?

or

THE DEATH OF THE AUTHORS

Le Sacre du Printemps (1913)Nicholas Roerich ©

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Le Sacre du Printemps (2013)© Delal Isci

Programme

A non-exhaustive list of Le Sacre du Printemps

Artist statements

Parrots in the Mirror, Rita Natáli

On the possibility of dancing to death,Min Kyoung Lee

Appropriated by, João dos Santos Martins

IndexForeword

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Biographies

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FOREWORD

This program, which is also a small publication, came about by the de-sire to bring together the archaeological, anthropological, artistic and philosophical wealth of what The Rite of Spring is/can be. Premiered on the 29 May 1913 in Paris by the Ballets Russes, as a collaboration bet-ween Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Roerich, this work has become a milesto-ne of 20th century art. Since then, more than 300 choreographers have created different versions of the Rite, which makes it the most repre-sented and exhausted choreography of the last century. For the centennial anniversary of Le Sacre du Printemps, we have collected here a series of documents, lists, essays and pictures relating to to the issues that emerge from the Rite and its histories. This is also the result of our interest in articulating ways of thinking and doing in performance making, revealing how different discourses have fed Le Sacre du Printemps (2013). Furthermore, we hope this publication will have its own performative character, enriching the experience of the Rite as a multiple, chaotic and dispersed work, as it truly has been.

João dos Santos Martins & Min Kyoung Lee

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may 29, 1913

The Rite of Spring (Script)

FIRST ACTThe AdorATion of The eArTh

Spring. The Earth is covered in flowers. The Earth is covered with grass. A great joy reigns high on Earth. The Men take up the dance and ques-tion the future according to their rites. The Forefather of all the Sages him-self participates in the Glorification of Spring. He is led out to be united with the great and abundant Earth. Everyone stamps the earth in ecstasy.

SECOND ACTThe SAcrifice

After nightfall: after midnight. There are hallowed stones on the hills. The young dancers play mysticalgames and seek the Grand Way. The one who has been chosen to be offe-red up to God is glorified and acclaimed. The ancestors are called upon as venerated witnesses. And the wise ancestors of the men contemplate the sacrifice. It is thus that we sacrifice to Jarilo, the magnificent, the flaming.

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A NON

EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF

SACRE DU PRITEMPS1

1 “Chaque chorégraphe porte un Sacre en lui.”

This list is the result of a personal research and intends to establish an anthology of art works and artists that thought and worked on The Rite of Spring since its premiere in 1913. The research was partially done using readymade lists, such as the one from Roehampton Univer-sity, from essays by Susan Manning, Lynn Garafola, Theodore Bale and other researches. It was additionally completed through Internet search engines and by word of mouth. The list is not selective, including choreographers and artists from all over the world. If the work was not titled Le Sacre du Printemps, the list provides the title of the work.

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YEAR ARTIST WORK TITLE

1913 Vaslav Nijinsky

1920 Léonide Massine

1930 Lasar Galpern Frühlingsopfer

1931 Marion Herrmann Frühlingsweihe

1932 Boris Romanov La consagración de la primavera

1933

1934 Agnes de Mille Primitive Dance

1935

1936

1937 Lester Horton

1938

1939

1940 Walt Disney Fantasia

1941 Aurel Milloss La Sagra della Primavera

1942

1943

1944 Margaret Barr

1945

1946

1947

1948 Hettie Loman Scarecrows

1949 Rudolf Kölling

1950

1951 Jaroslav Berger

1952

1953 Yvonne Georgi

1954

1955

1956

1957 Mary Wigman Frühlingsweihe

1958

1959 Maurice Béjart

1960 Leonid Jacobson Troika

J. Marks The Rite of Spring

1962 Alfred Rodrigues Swieto Wiosny

Kenneth MacMillan

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1963 Nicholas Beriozoff

Imre Eck

1964 Patricio Bunster Uka-Ara

Luboš Ogoun Svecení Jara

Karol Tóth Svätenie Jari

1965 Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov

1966 Oscar Araiz

Sophie Maslow The Gentleman from Cracow

1967 Flemming Flindt

1968 Wazlaw Orlikowsky

1969 Bernard Hourseau The Rite of Spring

1970 Erich Walter

1971

1972 Nicolas Petrov Rite of Spring

Ugo dell’ Ara

Tom Adair

John Neumeier Le Sacre

John Taras La Sagra della Primavera

1973

1974 Joyce Trisler Rite of Spring

Brian Macdonald The Lottery

Hans van Manen

Glen Tetley

1975 Vittorio Biagi

Joseph Holmes

Sorokina NIna & Vladimirov Y.

Pina Bausch Das Frühlingsopfer

1976 Joyce Tristler

Frances Smith Cohen The Rite of Spring

1977 Constantin Patsalas The Rite of Spring

Valery Panov Szenen aus dem heidnischen Russland

1978 John Pasqualetti Rite of Spring

Brian Macdonald Rite of Spring

1979 Joseph Russillo

Valentin Yelizarev Vesna Sviashchennaia

1980 Paul Taylor Le Sacre du printemps (The Rehearsal)

Juan Giuliano

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1981 Jean-Pierre Bonnefous

Richard Alston The Rite of Spring: Pictures of Pagan Russia

Dietmar Seyffert

1982 Ulf Gadd

Johannes Kresnik Sacre

Norbert Vesak Sagração da Primavera

Daniel Léveillé

John Grant Das Frühlingsopfer

Gray Veredon

1983 Helen Douglas Rite of Spring

1984 Jason Childers The Rite Stuff

Conrad Drzewiecki

Carlos Trincheiras Sagração da Primavera

Martha Graham The Rite of Spring

Mats Ek Våroffer

Lin Hwai-min Rite of Spring, Taipei, 1984

1985 Rebecca Kelley Dream Driven

Tom Schilling Die Probe

Jean-Christophe Maillot

1986 Jorma Uotinen Uhri [Victim]

Patrick Roger

1987 James Kudelka

Millicent Hodson & Kenneth Archer for the Joffrey Ballet

Martine Epoque

Linda Crockett The Rite of Spring

Marcello Parisi and Donatella Capraro

Harold Collins Rite of Spring

1988 Jane Hudson and Steve Sciscenti

Ismael Ivo [Rite of Spring]

George Lefebre

Kinematic Broken Hill

Irene Schneider

Molissa Fenley State of Darkness

Jorge Lefebre

1989 Giovanotti Meccanici L’ Adoration de la terre

Virgilio Sieni and Alessandro Certini

Royston Maldoom

1990 Tomoko Ehara The Rite of Spring

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Loyce Houlton

Horst Müller

Min Tanaka

Dietmar Seyffert Clown Gottes

William Anthony

1991 Javier de Frutos Consecration

1991 국수호 봄의 제전

Saburo Teshigawara Dah-dah-sko-dah-dah

Hans Tuerlings

Stephen Petronio & Michael Clark Wron Wrong

Michael Clark Modern Masterpieces

Johannes Bönig Beltane

1992 Michael Clark Rite Now

Michael Clark Michael Clark’s Modern Masterpiece

Michael Clark Mmm...

Stephen Petronio Half Wrong plus Laytext

Bernd Schindowski Sacres

1993 Weiya Chen Greenfield

Salvatore Aiello The Rite of Spring

Toshiko Takeuchi The Rite of Spring

Robert Steele The Rite of Spring

Emil Wesolowski The Rite of Spring

Sooho Kook The Rite of Spring

Marie Chouinard

Maryse Delente

1994 Mauricio Wainrot

Stephen Petronio Full Half Wrong

Lise Eger Vårofferet

Javier de Frutos The Palace Does Not Forgive

Paul Timothy Diaz Mark II: Life Foiling Death

Gloria Contreras The Rite of Spring

1995 Akiko Kitamura The Rite of Spring

Marie Fahlin Våroffer

Matthew Wright Evolution

H art Chaos

Tamás Juronics Tavaszi áldozat

Eric Languet The Rite of Spring

Sakiko Oshima

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Jérôme Bel Jérôme Bel

1996 Laurence Rawlins Nocturnal Diary

Birgit Scherzer

M. Benaouisse, H. van den Meersschaut, N. van Kelst

Renato Zanella Sacre

René Pegliasco

Ed Wubbe

1997 Elsa Wolliaston Réveil

Xing Liang The Rite of Spring

Jerzy Graczyk

Arila Siegert

Jean-Jacques Vidal

João Penalva Wallenda

Mark Godden The Rite of Spring

Yevgeni Panfilov The Rite of Spring

Stephen Page Rites

Stefan Haufe

1998 Mark Dendy Dream Analysis

Molissa Fenley

Heidrun Schwaarz Nijinsky Gott des Tanzes

1999 Tom Plischke events for television (again)

박은화 봄의 제전

Katarzyna Kozyra The Rite of Spring

Carlotta Ikeda Haru No Saiten

Roberto Galván

Nathalie Pernette and Andréas Schmid

Anthony Taylor

Jirí Kyselak Sveceni jara

Yvette Bozsik Stravinsky: Le Sacre du printemps

Jörg Lensing Le Sacre

Saburo Teshigawara

2000 Mark Baldwin The Rite of Spring

Xin Peng Wang Sventasis Pavasaris

Christine Gaigg Sacre Material

Wayne Eagling

Bartabas Triptyk

Johan Inger Dream Play

2001 Li Hangzhong and Ma Bo

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Heinz Spoerli Sacre du Printemps HEADHUNTING

Angelin Preljocaj

Claudio Bernardo Le Sacre, O Sacrifício

Sanna Kekäläinen Uhri - Sacre

Emil Wesolowski Sacred Spring - The Dancer’s Tale

2002 Johannes Wieland

Javier de Frutos [Sacre]

David Bolger The Rite of Spring

Richard Wherlock

Richard Alston The Rite of Spring

Antonio Gomes

Pavel Mikulastik

Lionel Hoche

Juan Pablo Ledo

Youri Vamós

Tero Saarinen Hunt

Mike Salomon Sacre

Henning Paar

2003 Régis Obadia The Rite of Spring

Ileana Citaristi Spirit Land

Shen Wei The Rite of Spring

Motaz Kabbani

Sylvie Guillermin

Uwe Scholz

Javier de Frutos Milagros

CLIPA Theatre / Idit Herman

Uwe Scholz

Pamela Walsh The Rite of Spring

Doug Varone

2004 Julie Atlas Muz Rite of Spring

Alonzo King The Rite of Spring

Emanuel Gat The Rite of Spring

Stijn Celis Rite

Robert Lloyd Garland Spring Rites

Heddy Maalem

Raimund Hoghe Sacre - The Rite of Spring

Michael Sakamoto The Rite of Spring, etc.

Lionel Hoche and Rodolpho Leoni

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2005 Martin Stiefermann

Georges Momboye

Stijn Celis

Marie-Claude Pietragalla The Rite of Spring

John Alleyne The Rite of Spring

Ross McKim Chosen

2006 Konstantinos Rigos Igor’s Room

Michael Clark Stravinsky Project Part 2: Mmm...

Jorge Alcolea La consagración de la Primavera

Bianca van Dillen Sacre

Klaus Obermaier Rites

서용석 봄의 제전

Sharita Elinor Friedberg The Rite of Spring

2007 Xavier Le Roy

Yvonne Rainer RoS Indexical

김효진 춤을 추며 산을 오르다

The Devoted: A Bellydance Collective

Katarína Mojžišová

Christophe Garcia Showcase Triology

Cie. Étant Donné

Joseph Sturdy

Andonis Foniadakis

Nils Christe

2008 Philippe Egli

안은미 봄의 제전

김효진 봄의 제전 2 – 춤을 추며 산을 오른다

Francisco Centeno Consagración de la Primavera

Marguerite Donlon The Rite of Spring

My Choreography Rite of Spring

Bronislav Roznos

2009 BalletBoyz The Rite of Spring

Lars Scheibner

Christopher Stowell The Rite of Spring

Jorma Elo Sacre du printemps

Adam Hougland Rite of Spring

Meryl Tankard’ The Oracle

안성수 Rose

김효진 봄의 제전 3

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e-dance The Rites of Spring

Ismael Ivo The Waste Land

2010 Ismael Ivo

Mia Facchinelli-Siska

Fabulous Beast

Roger Bernat La Consagracíon de la Primavera

Marion Muzac/Rachel Garcia Le Sucre du Printemps

Bruce Wood Rite of Spring

Olga Roriz A Sagração da Primavera

Rui Catalão Domados, ou não

Christian Klaus Frank Danse Sacrale 187

Lizzie Leopold

Maria Robira

Faizal Zeghoudi

2011 Cayetano Soto A Sagração da Primavera

David Wampach Sacre

Leonardo Ramos Sagração da Primavera

Jean-Claude Gallotta

Norberto dos Santos

Oorphane Contemporary Dance Theatre

John Castagna

Marguerite Donlon

Carlos Miró

Ginette Laurin

2012 Dominique Brun Sacre # 197

Tom Dale with Chris Caffrey, Tia Ogilve and Alice Vale

Ériu Dance Co./Fidget Feet Aerial Dance Co.

Christian Comte

Josep Caballero García NE DANSE PAS SI TU NE VEUX PAS

Musashi Alvarez Exhalted Offering

Edward Clug

이정희 봄의 제전

황미숙 봄의 제전

Amy Smith Rights of Spring

Laurent Chétouane Sacré Sacre du Printemps

Nashville ballet

Olivier Dubois Prêt a baiser

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Jürg Koch

2013 Bill T. Jones

Joost Vrouenraets

Sasha Waltz

Edwaard Liang

Jose Navas

Mónica Calle A Sagração da Primavera

Olga Roriz A Sagração da Primavera [solo]

Tatiyana Baganova

Stanton Welch

Josep Caballero García No [‘rait] of spring

Josep Caballero García Sacres

Yuri Possokhov The rite of spring

Christine Gaigg DeSacre!

Marcela Giesche

Jorge Hoyos and Nir Vidan

Milla Koistinen

Melanie Lane

Adam Linder

Lea Moro

Kenji Ouellet

Tian Rotteveel

Kareth Schaffer

Netta Yerushalmy

Gaetan Boulorde

Wayne Mcgregor

Romeo CastellucciDominique Brun Sacre #3 [new re-construction of Nijinsky’s

ballet]

unknown dates

John CliffordYvonne Braue

Rite of Spring, “The Rehearsal”Das Frühlingsopfer

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BILL T. JONES As our creative team struggled to “get our arms” around this project, a never-ending challenge was whose Rite of Spring were we considering? Was it Nijinsky’s epic making movement choices at the service of Stravinsky’s/Ni-cholas Roerich’s libretto/synopsis situated in the archaism of Russia’s pagan past complete with “pri-mitive” movements and a sacrificial virgin? Or was it to be Stravinsky’s modernist re-write of the rules of composition and orchestration? Though the apparition of what was staged that night in Paris and the scandal of the opening performance confronted us regularly, we have — for the most part — tried to look past the libretto and engage the music and the 100-ye-ar-old discourse around it with as fresh and personal an approach as possible.

MICHAEL CLARK There really is no other choice. Not only did Stravinsky fearlessly dare to venture into a new, un-discovered sonic landsca-pe, anticipating what we would spend the rest of the century trying to catch up with, he also (presen-ted) the world a piece of music that could only be completed by dance – the sacrificial dance. Through total disregard for most

of the established con-ventions of 19th-century classical music, his radical use of tonality, dissonance, metre, stress and, most of all, rhythm (he elevated rhythm in itself to the dignity of art), Stravinsky created music that soun-ded like what people were feeling. Stravinsky foresaw the real conflict of war and revolution, life or death confronted on a daily basis

– the willingness to die for one's beliefs. The notion of self-sacrifice for the grea-ter good: art. This work is the soundtrack to the 20th century, a map of the in-ternal, psychological world we were to inhabit for the forseeable future. A bleak terrain. A battleground of contradictory impulses, ideologies and desires.

VALENTINE HUGO Pourtant, l’argument de Stravinski est tout ce qu’il y a de plus inoffensif: « J’entrevis dans mon ima-gination le spectacle d’un grand rite sacral païen: les vieux sages, assis en cercle, et observant la danse à la mort d’une jeu-ne fille, qu’ils sacrifient pour leur rendre propice le dieu du printemps (…)

MAURICE BÉJART J’ai voulu exprimer la sublime montée de la na-ture qui se renouvelle, le trouble vague et profond de la puberté universelle, la terreur sacrée devant le soleil de midi. Au dos

de la pochette du disque, on racontait la legende inventée par Stravinsky et son ami Nicolas Roerich: tableaux de la Russie païenne. Je pensais que le printemps n’avait rien à voir avec des vieillards russes regardant une jeune fille comme si c’était Suzanne au bain. Et ça m’embêtait vrai-ment de terminer par une mort, pour des raisons personnelles et parce que la musique indiquait tout le contraire. (…) Je raconterai l’histoire d’un couple. Pas un couple privilégié, mais n’impor-te quel couple, donc le couple. D’où vient chacun des deux et comment ils se rencontrent. Je n’en ferai ni des paysans russes, ni des bourgeois, ni des bergers grecs. Ce seront des hommes et des fem-mes, point final. (...) Je commençais tout de suite par la variation de l’Élue. Bari debout au milieu de la scène, un bras le long du corps et une main lui cachant un œil dans un geste d’orante. Des filles couchées autour d’elle, bras et jambes écartées, soulèveraient leur bassin comme des bourgeons qui sont prêts à s’ouvrir. C’était le début de la deuxième partie du Sacre. Mon rêve était de créer ce ballet dans les grottes de Lascaux.(…) Les répétitions ne furent pas simples. La troupe n’était

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soudée par aucun passé commun. J’étais nerveux. Il m’arrivait de mieux savoir ce que je ne voulais pas que ce que je voulais. Il fallait empêcher les danseurs d’exprimer des sentiments personnels. À la limite, je voulais qu’ils aient l’air bête. Ils avaient à subir une force qui les dépassait. (…) Il ne me fallait pas des garçons, il me fallait des cuisses, des poings, des rejets brusques de la tête. Il ne me fallait pas des bergères effarouchées ou des reines en exil, il me fallait des ventres ronds, des dos creusés.(…)Je me cramponnais à mon idée. Je voulais la force animale. J’avais vu, au cours d’une séance de cinéma, un court-métrage sur les cerfs en rut, des cerfs faisant l’amour. Ils étaient en mesure avec les rythmes de Stravinsky ! Il est capital d’avoir un même nombre de filles et de garçons : ça n’est pas courant mais ça me paraît tomber sous le sens, parce que c’est comme ça dans la rue, dans le métro, dans la vie. Dans le final du Sacre, j’avais besoin de couples parce qu’ils avaient tous besoin de faire l’amour : je voulais montrer la force vitale qui pousse à se reproduire.« (Flammarion, 1979).ANGELIN PREJLOCAJRemonter la énième version du Sacre du

Printemps m’apparaissait comme une chose vaine et insurmontable. (...) Les mariages arrangés, cela fut vrai en France jadis comme en Russie. Dans les Balkans dont je suis issu, j’ai vu des mariages qui étaient de véritables rapts consentis de la mariée. C’est pour elle non pas une fête mais une tragédie. Elle perd tout, son enfance, sa famille, sa virginité. Ce drame dé-chirant, on l’entend dans la musique de Stravinski. L’amour est absent.(...) A blend of madness at the thought of perpetrating an act literally dictated by the very molecules of our being and at the same time of jubilation stimula-ted by our senses? A leap forward imbued here with the power of an irreme-diable force. (...) When faced with this ancestral mechanism, the bodies of the dancers, drunk with exhaustion, have no choice but to participate in this ritual. (...) Bringing the clan together around an impulse that is, in the end, biological, the Rite of Spring reminds us that as long as men and women continue in their spiritual, cultural or intellectual quest, they will unceasingly and inevitably stumble against this weakness. As Pascal Quignard says in “sex and fright”: “we carry with us the mental disarray of our

own conception.(...)There is no image that shocks us more than that of remin-ding us of the gestures of our very inception.

RAIMUND HOGHEIl n’y a ni victime, ni sacrifié, mais deux êtres qui s’aident mutuelle-ment pour ne pas l’être.

DAVID WAMPACH The Rite of Spring presents multiple themes, all of which fascinate me : ritual, ceremony, state of ecstasy, inebriation, grogginess. My entrance point in explo-ring The Rite of Spring will not be Stravinsky’s music or Nijinski’s dance, but Roerich’s work on the costumes, inspired by traditional folk costumes, some of which belonged to the collection of a Russian princess. Nicolas Roeri-ch founded the Roerich Pact, which defended the protection of artistic and scientific institutions and historical monuments: he could have invented the word «heritage». I explore The Rite of Spring throu-gh the angle of costume, because the work we have done, in collaboration with Rachel Garcia, on my earlier performances, has always placed the costume at the same level as dance and setting : costume that hides and reveals, dresses and undresses.

IGOR STRAVINSKY I am the vessel through which the Sacre passed.

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HEDDY MAALEM Le Sacre has been per-formed a thousand times, unforgettable yet always new, with the same sho-cking joy overflowing out of time, out of the ages, an edge, the alliance of the arches, the high sound of the grass being cut by a scythe, stalking an animal, its charge, a stream run-ning over and under the earth, the inexplicable rhythm of fires burning at night, a line of shrieks blotting out a whimper. Unstoppable violence. How we would have liked to not have heard the de-ath knell of the old drums, their power, their deep vi-brations which encourage the idea: animate, then kill. Our dawn finds us enmeshed in the process of recognizing the forces knotting our bodies, we are dancing. To the same chord, united in complete dis-harmony to celebrate this Sacre, dancing what is dead, what lives again and will die. Show the ritual, that which mixes death with life, bones and ash. To say again what a man does to celebrate the gift of such a terrible joy

MARIE CHOUINARDIl n’y a pas d’histoire dans mon Sacre, pas de dé-roulement, pas de cause à effet. Seulement de la synchronicité. C’est com-me si j’avais abordé la première seconde suivant

l’instant de l’apparition de la vie dans la matière. Le spectacle, c’est le déploiement de cette seconde. J’ai l’impression qu’avant cette seconde, il y a eu l’intervention extraordinaire d’une lumière, d’un éclair.

MARY WIGMANFilled with belief in the magical powers of pure virginal self-sacrifice, the Chosen One loses herself in the ecstasy of the sacrificial dance, as she sheds her blood and the-reby effects the renewed blessing of the earth for her tribe. She knows her destiny. For on long winter evenings she was initiated into the ritual secrets by the female elder [Mutter], who gave her instruction in suffering and endu-rance, in self-absorptions nd self-illumination. They will stand by her through the last and most difficult moments of self-transcen-dence and self-divestment.

MIN TANAKA Le danseur est celui qui doit se donner en sacrifi-ce. A tous mes danseurs je demande de se pre-senter spirituellement et physiquement purs sur scène. Près du mont Fuji (…) je cultive du riz et de legumes. J’ai des poules, quinze chèvres, deux ânes, quarante lapins, beaucoup de chats et des chiens. Entendez-moi bien: il ne

s’agit pas d’exprimer le corps du fermier mais le fait tangible que nos som-mes tous fermiers. L’hom-me est fait pour ça et le spectateur doit pouvoir, dans cette pièce, sentir la densité de ce corps-là. La vie agricole est une experience physique ter-rible. (…) il ne s’agit pas de faire un portrait de la nature mais de faire sentir à quell point notre corps, c’est la nature elle-même. (…) J’ai vu Le Sacre de Bé-jart ou la version de Pina Bausch. Je dirais que j’ai retenu la force physique de l’un et le fatalisme de l’autre. Mais ce qui comp-te le plus pour moi, reside dans le choix des dan-seurs, dans le fait d’aimer leur vie et l’histoire de chacun d’eux. Leur corps ou leur technique m’im-porte peu. Seul compte leur désir et le mien et le désir très intense que ce qui est cassé en eux – leur individualité – puisse se reconstruire dans la danse. (interview dans le program du spectacle,1990)

OLGA RORIZ Algo ficou por fazer, tanto ficou por ser dito. Preten-do encontrar um outro estar, uma acumulação do mesmo mas sempre em renovação, jamais entendido. Ignorar os ta-bus, reescrever a história, acrescentar as referências e criar o momento. Paixão, memórias e saber, man-

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ter-se-ão intactos, serão respeitados mas sem voz, sem espaço, sem presen-te. Corpo a corpo num confronto nunca pacífico.

PINA BAUSCH Here one sees the original libretto as if viewed from afar: the adoration of the earth, the veneration of the forces of nature, the glorification of life at the beginning of spring; the group which needs, searches, and finds its sacrificial victim; the anxiety over who will be the sacrificial victim; the fear of the sacrificial vic-tim in the face of death; the power that radiates from the executor of the group will (the oldest or the wise one or the chief); the relentless of the group that is dam-ned to sacrifice on order to live; and then the breaking out of the forces of nature within us and around us (the spring); and not least the purpose that the living give to the sacrificial victim and that the sacrificial victim gives to those who survive.

JEAN COCTEAU Le Sacre est encore une œuvre fauve, une œuvre fauve organisée. Gauguin et Matisse s’inclinent devant lui. Mais si le retard de la musique sur la peinture empêchait nécessairement le Sacre d’être en coïncidence avec d’autres inquiétu-

des, il n’en apportait pas moins une dynamite indis-pensable (…). Symphonie empreinte d’une tristesse sauvage, de terre en gésine, bruits de ferme et de camp, petites mélodies qui arrivent du fond des siècles, halètement de bé-tail, secousses profondes, géorgiques de préhistoire. Certes, Stravinsky avait regardé les toiles de Gau-guin, mais, se transposant, le faible registre décoratif était devenu un colosse. (in Le Coq et l’arlequin, éd. Stock, 2009.)

XAVIER LE ROY To succeed in decoding the score and to do all these movements, I learned to read music and borrowed, for certain parts, from the choreo-graphies of Nijinski, Pina Bausch, Martha Graham and Maurice Béjart, pinpointing moments where the choreography stuck very close to the music. For example, Ni-jinski’s was useful for the dance of the chosen one, the moment of sacrifice, which is an extremely difficult passage to count, one where I was unable to keep time. I managed to access that passage by removing the jumps and by changing the arm movements so that I could move in time to the rhy-thm. That obviously takes some of the colour out of my movements at that

point. The version by Pina Bausch has a big circle dance at the beginning of the second act, with the arm and chest movements so typical of her cho-reography. She conveys exactly what I hear in the music, and her influence can be seen in my big arm movements in that se-quence. There are thus a lot of ghosts present when listening to or viewing Le sacre du printemps.

YVONNE RAINER I call it a revision of Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The source materials vary from the BBC dramatization of the making of The Rite of Spring called Riot at the Rite. I drew a lot of images from that, with the Finnish National Ballet performing a so-called reconstruction of The Rite of Spring. But I also bring in other material including Groucho Marx and Robin Williams and Sarah Bernhardt and all kinds of gestural materials into the mix. I like to call it a pedagogical vaudevil-le, as it’s both a kind of pedagogical reference or teaching instrument, but also it’s very funny and a mixture of things in the way vaudeville was. It’s an entertainment. (...) RoS Indexical is chore-ographic in that it’s all about movement, but my primary interest is these historical, avant-garde

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moments — like 1913, when what Vaslav Nijinsky was doing was so radical. I’ve always been interes-ted in those avant-gardes from 1900 to the present. I consider my work to be in a direct line from Du-champ, Cage and Cunnin-gham, but also from those earlier avant-gardes.

AMANDA APETREA (MY CHOREOGRAPHY)The show is done through reversed improvisation. Which is that first we studied the score and looked at a lot of referen-ces from other rites that have been made through history. We did that for a week i think and then from the first rehearsal we think of it as a pre-miere of the piece and do a complete run- through of it, then improvised. The next time we do it we try to remember the version we made before and we go on like that, always with complete run- throughs trying to remeber what we did in the version just before. (...) well we mapped out the score as a time line from 1913 up do the days date, hm, it was 2008 I guess... so we’d have places in the music were it would be world war 2 and the independence day of iceland and so on. And yeah, all references that would come to mind from other Rites (excerpt of an e-mail exchange)

VASLAV NIJINSKY Aujourd’hui je sais que le Sacre du Printemps existera quand tout sera comme nous le voulons tous deux: nouveau, beau, et complètement diffé-rent - pour le spectateur ordinaire ce sera une expériences émotionelle bouleversante. (Letter to Igor) I am accused of ‘cri-mes against grace,’ among other things. It seems that because I have danced in ballets…which aim at gra-ce pure and simple, I am to be tied down to ‘grace’ forever…[the words] ‘gra-ce’ and ‘charm’ make me feel sea sick. (...) I could compose graceful ballets of my own if I wanted to…[but] the fact is, I detest conventional ‘nightingale and rose’ poetry; my own inclinations are primitive. I eat my meat without sauce Béarnaise. There have been schools of pain-ting and sculpture that went on getting sauver and sauver until there was no expression but only banality left; then there has always come a revolt. Perhaps something like this has happened in dan-cing. (interview to Daily Mail, 1913).

JACQUES RIVIÈRE La grande nouveauté du Sacre du Printemps, c’est le renoncement à la

“sauce”. Voici une ouvre absolument pure. Aigre et dure, si vous voulez; mais dont aucun jus ne ternit

l’éclat, dont aucune cuisine n’arrange ni ne salit les contours. Ce n’est pas une ouvre d’art, avec tous les petits tripotages habituels. Rien d’estompé, rien de diminué par les ombres; point de voiles ni d’adoucissements poétiques; aucune trace d’atmosphère. L’oeuvre est entière et brute, les morceaux en restent tout crus; ils nous sont livrés sans rien qui prépare la digestion; tout ici est franc, intact, limpide et grossier. (La Nouvelle Re-vue Française, nov. 1913) LAURENT CHÉTOUANE Our aim is to touch some-thing new and with this to produce a community. I mean this absolutely in a political sense. There is this longing for communi-ty. (...) the confrontation with their naivety, their carefreeness was impor-tant. Sheer simplicity has already become strange and unusual for many peo-ple. The greatest stran-geness, I think, one finds in one’s own body. So not in the search outside, but in introspection. Where are my own minorities in myself? That was our starting point. (...) My dancers are likely to be accepted by the majority, they are white and they look like dancers. At first glance the viewers seem to be able to fully identify with them. But it is when they start to move that

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the dancers reject the identification. We have analysed this relationship to the audience. We have worked on the dancers’ awareness that they are being observed and exa-mined what this means for the moving bodies. I force my dancers to perceive that they are being obser-ved. By the other. By the audience. Where exactly do we perceive otherness? Where does this otherness take place? How do we make it perceptible? The dancers have told me that the awareness of being observed triggers in them a new perception of the body. The dancers con-nected once again with the desire to move. This released a tremendous energy. MILLECENT HODSONNot only had a single masterpiece been allowed to disappear, but a style and method of choreo-graphy (...) My hypothesis was that the ballet might prove as interesting in its own right as the often told tale of its opening(…) A reconstructed Sacre would not diminish the attraction of future choreographers to the score. On the contrary, it might give them…a more concrete sense of history. (Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace)

ARTIST STATEMENTS

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PARROTS IN THE MIRROR1

Dear ________,

I’ve learned to copy as if there is no tomorrow. Since I woke up, I can only talk through repetition, doubles, photocopies, friends, acquaintances, voices, voices and voices. I have a sinking feeling in my stomach, a nausea that seems to come from a zone of Darkness, although I’m unable to locate the reason for such an affliction in any decent book, except in that famous one by Max Weber, the one that mentions the disenchantment of the world for the first time. But, not even that provides me any support, I really feel a seve-re sickness and a need to take that anti-dispersive that no psychiatrist has yet invented. I could be redundant and say: I don’t know my voice. But that would be like pretending I’m a virgin that masturbates excessively, realising that she never had access to a terrible sex experience. What I really would like to say to you is that for me, it’s irresistibly fucktastic to imagine my own ideas about the world through the voices of others. I live within the reality of repetition - imitating my own autistic becoming - not as a machine of similarities, but replicating for the obstinacy of that which is alive. I have been replicating for the incorporeal insistence of that which I don’t understand. In other words: I live through that which I don’t understand, replicated in the vertigo of a plane called History, in which no delirium is about fathers and mothers, but about the Asian steppe, the secrets of beehives, about geographies and remapped maps of maps that no one has yet mapped rigorously. Did someone say this before? Yes, someone said this before, and I am glad someone did, because I want to celebrate it. I want to live the delirium of vanishing in the aforesaid steppes, of not wanting to leave any trace, no author.

1 Pre-publication of an excerpt of Rita Natálio’s post-graduation dissertation to be completed at PUC-SP under the supervision of Peter Pal Pélbart (Scholarship granted by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation / 2012-2014)

by RITA NATÁLIO

translated from portuguese byJosé Luís Neves

by RITA NATÁLIO

translated from portuguese byJosé Luís Neves

To-be-able-to-disappear is my placenta. In fact, in the past, to map accurately has proven to be a mistake. But today, to map inaccurately de-monstrates the present barbaric dimension of wanting to chart the incom-prehensible through known forms. Faced with the choice between both, I un-decide. Who are the barbarians? Who is civilized? What happens now now now, now that I press my finger (digitum) on my computer’s keyboard? What happens now now now now that the vertigo of the repeating-becoming may one day be combined with my genome, perhaps leading us into something extremely violent, where nothing needs to be said and all proof will be used against me-all? Would that be a novelty? I will most definitely have the right to be wiped out of the world of labour, as any other member of the society of knowledge that dares to say they have no “creativity” value in its production, a plagiarist in a world that abolished tradition. My diagnosis will be cancer; because of the way I replicate the world descriptively, as if it were a game of repeated insistences, even if many people do not receive a similar punishment when doing it surreptitiously. Isn’t cancer a cellular proliferation disaster, of things that one would rather have purified, such as the Body, Reason, the Sub-ject or the Sun? Well, my proliferation is that of repeating correct and incor-rect voices. I just let the monster live. I have nothing to add, except for the fact that the world changes incessantly every time I take a step. “I” as equal measure of the “World”. Formerly a state-city, now a body-world. The world encompasses my pace, it globalizes my pace, recuperates my pace, legitima-tes my pace, it transforms it into a pace among many others. The world makes my pace proliferate. My legs are pace-ing. Then, I am the bare essential of being: aliquid I declare: I shall repeat scrupulously. I declare: I shall cultivate figures and cosmogonies in order to talk about all our parrots in the mirror. And for sure, I will not fall into the most obvious traps of capitalism, planetary identi-ty, consumer society, information society, and many other brilliant terms that attempt to explain phenomena by squeezing the exterior with their all-en-compassing dimension. To tackle the world within world-words is not enough. I want to celebrate, not explicate, victimize or describe the present. Among many other things that I don´t know, I believe that this contemporary form of creating Xerox worlds can be a form of magic transformed into science. A form among many others, that others and I can use to pose as wizards of thought.Magic lies in the possibility that I can create literature from the world’s grea-test disasters. Magic lies in the possibility that I can repeat as if I could predict the future. Isn’t that irresistibly fucktastic?

Hope you like what is about to come.

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On May 29, 1913, Valentine Cross-Hugo wrote the following:

All that has been written about the battle of the Rite of Spring is inferior to reality. It was as if the room had been hit by an earthquake. The room see-med to vacillate within the uproar. Amongst the shouting, slander, howling, hissing that took over the music...2

What happened on this day? It is difficult to retrace one’s steps, but it is also di-fficult to start today, especially when one has to start from the very same. How to talk about the same? How to flesh something out?

In 1913, when War with a capital W was not yet possible, The Rite of Spring – des-cribed above by Valentine - came into existence. Considered today as the magnum opus of modernity (as many other “magnum” works of the 20th century that were also recognized a posteriori), the Rite, or at least its “ghost-making-machine” identity, brought us to 2013 with the feeling that 100 years have intensified me-mory. That is, if one can preserve a certain notion of scandal and ritual of imita-tion. Since the controversy caused by Diaghilev and Stravinsky’s presentation at the Champs Elysées theatre - accompanied by howling, shouts and the trembling of distraught ladies and gentlemen - echoes and voices about the scandal and the incapacity of the audience in accepting the new, along with the discovery of an obscure dimension of human nature and its incapacity to accept the inhumane, have reverberated unrelentingly and until today.

How does one start anew? It could be a lot easier than it seems: if no one has for-gotten The Rite of Spring until today, it is simply because it could not be forgotten. The facts prove it; its disruption demanded us to carry it on. After its premiere, when the decision was made to recuperate the lost vision of the Rite, which no one had re-staged after the scandal -leading to the inauguration of a compulsive histo-rical motivation that led to the re-staging of more than 300 versions of the play - it was evident that a myth was born. A “foundational myth”, that is, a fire one should not play with. And once the myth is retrospectively explained, the existence of hundreds of versions of the Rite simply becomes a game of accurately explained arguments resulting from its mythical origin.

However, despite the tautological and self-explanatory characteristics of the myth, when history and myth seem to function within the same structures, our distrust is immediate. On the other hand, there are elements that allow one to think about the repercussion of this choreography upon our bodies, elements that surpass the thought about popularity and myth making. One needs only to intersect these bo-dies with time data and the marks of the century. Ideas and bodies blend, bodies can sustain plenty and can even mix the several orders and nature that logic separates.

2 Translated by the author: “Tout ce qu’on a écrit sur la bataille du Sacre du printemps reste inférieur à la réalité. Ce fut comme si la salle avait été soulevée par un tremblement de terre. Elle semblait vaciller dans le tumulte. Des hurlements, des injures, des hululements, des sifflets soutenus qui dominaient la musique…” http://www.espacemalraux-chambery.fr/pdf/lesacreduprintemps.pdf

SIDE AThe surface of the century battles the profound of the century

Let us begin with Nijinsky, the mythical madman from the depths of the 20th century, a contemporary of Artaud, and also Aby Warburg (who also suffered from nerves, a fact that many are unaware of). Nijinsky knew better than anyone else how to portray the troubled nature of his contemporaries, a nature paradoxically impelled to implode and to expose itself to the outside. Nijinsky, a Freudian ani-mist, a wizard of irrationalities ready to be revealed, created a choreography of liberation. Freud explained, Nijinsky made, and others continued this work, revealing the interior of humans as a possible infinite space, with its inexhaustible psychic and libidinal economy, even when inhabited by death impulses, irrationa-lity, violence, fauna-becomings, flora-becomings.

Retrospectively, one could argue that the repression of the emotional and affecti-ve dimensions during this period was so strong that the Unconscious described by Freud, even if wanting to liberate itself, became fatally responsible for revealing the worst and the best of ourselves; a pure “ancestral Terror” machine, as descri-bed by Preljocaj apropos his version of the Rite (2001). One of the 20th century trademarks would then be a mad Nijinsky, alongside the construction of a choreo-graphy divided between Apollo and Dionysius’ combat, with the particular flesh of a War (with a capital W) that was about to inaugurate the possibility of insecurity and risk in all territories, along with the formalization of Psychoanalysis, which introduced the depth of the I as the “entrails” of the being.War and the explosion of the psychic went hand in hand with the gradual emergence of the individual as political and psychic unit - the mark of its “I”, of its character, of its figure, or even of an author – producing the framework we recognize and trivialise today. Nijinsky, transformed into a living legend of the 20th century, is perhaps the most singular image of the “unique” mad man, a window to understand a substantial part of the immortalization process of 1913’s Rite into a classic dance work.

In a book about this particular 20th century (“The century” scripted in the be-ginning of the year 2000), Badiou argues that in order to approach something of the 20th century one needs a methodology: “My idea is that we stick as closely as possible to the subjectivities of the century. Not just to any subjectivity, but precisely to the kind of subjectivity that relates to the century itself. The goal is to try and see if the phase ‘twentieth century’ bears a certain pertinence of thinking, in a manner that goes beyond mere empirical calculation. Thus, we will adopt a method of maximal interiority. Our aim is not to judge the century as an objective datum, but rather to ask how it has come to be subjectivate.”3 What Badiou proposes is a method of maximum interiority that threads carefully on a glasshouse, without fearing the possibility of its overlapping firmness and fragility.

3 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano, [Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 5.

SIDE AThe surface of the century battles the profound of the century

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Same old song, but different

From 1913 to 2013, we lived a century. But what century was that? A hiatus of one hundred years inhabited by a myriad of versions of this majestic work, some of them jam-packed with sudden epiphanies about a return to pagan esotericism, others convinced that memory could be rescued through formal refinement, fa-vouring the choreography and the complex mathematics of the steps. Why this incessant return? The testimonials and articles written by choreographers and critics, insist on reminding us that the work was once 100% original and that it was lost on the following day (after the scandal that was its premiere). Therefo-re, its aura was real and precious, since on the day it was presented it was The Most Beautiful (see, the Most Rare).

Thus, a work between loud primitivism and the eulogy to technical virtuosity, intensely rethought by Dance History and fuelled by contradictions that incre-ased its interest through time, was born. Can one, therefore, argue that it is in this historical development of the Rite that the oeuvre constitutes itself? Or that the rereading of its memories and innumerable restagings opens, at least, a possible contemporary notion of oeuvre (and rite)? Take, for example, how our memory of 100 years of The Rite of Spring bestows itself to the spectacle of the world, how it ritualizes on behalf of a glorification act, or at least for the fixation of a certain tradition in Dance and its insurmountable oeuvres, that is, “erudite”. Take, for example, how a century of the Rite is also a perfect date to mark and commemorate the preservation of a certain “structuralism” of our vi-sions of Art History, ready to project upon its path, an enchantment of mythical appropriation, divided between the interpretations more or less reliable, more or less volcanic, more or less conceptual. Could it be that after one hundred years - from 1913 to 2013 - none of this was lost?

In reality, the emergence of the notion of the disenchantment of the world at the end of the 19th century was an accurate expression for the cogitation of an independent knowledge from God, the sacred and the spheres of divine. However, that process did not stop promoting the enchantment of other worlds, especially the place occupied by the marks of subjectivity, namely, the author, the work, and its divine statutes. The historical process of placing an individual (its unity) within the ontological and philosophical centre of society was desig-nated disenchantment, putting an end to a History of theological and political enchantment of the world where the individual is only relevant when part of the whole. To a certain extent, the conflict between universal and singular will remain as the greatest challenge of modern times, since the modern subject, when considering its new psychological framework and its novel political intran-sigence, will be born from the ruins of that other being, from that ontological accident. And one could argue that many of these structures persist until today, through the simplest revisiting of a Centennial.

SIDE B

What is then the point of having a deeper structural knowledge of Art History and of the 20th century, if not to organise time retrospectively? Does a stra-tegy pertaining to lineage and families, justify that which returns historically through its contexts? Would it be possible, for instance, to predict a particular type of interpretation of The Rite of Spring’s choreography in 2013? Would it be possible to elect the best version on the basis of a concept such as “our time”? Is there something within the structure – social political artistic – allowing us to predict the type of return to the past we will attempt?

Maybe the answer is simple: we will always respond retrospectively, as at pre-sent, defining Freud’s sage invention and the beautiful work of Nijinsky as some-thing that “had to happen that way”. Any context is the artifice that we create to love our eternal returns.

If we think about it, in the particular case of Dance, the particularity of seeing a classic constructing itself in the memory of the spectators and artists, as well as a tradition of a modernist choreographic language, is maybe rarer and stronger than all Shakespearean versions put together, since the dimension of the live experience and of non-textual matter is more averse to the schemes of mecha-nical reproducibility than theatre (as “text”).All this makes more obvious the value of the cult of the oeuvre (at least in the beginning of the century, when registering a performance through video was an impossibility).

One needs only to remember that it was in this century, close to the date when this piece was becoming myth, Walter Benjamin announced that the aura of works of art was irrevocably lost (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was published in 1936). Benjamin’s central question at the time concerned the loss or rarity (aura) of the work of art and how that implied a shift in its value. Maybe we should contemplate that “transformation” as a process of auratic transference, for example, from the oeuvre to their authors and contexts. Therefore, if with the loss of the aura one looses the cult value of the work of art, on the other hand, one can benefit from the possibility of being able to repeat continuously the world and the work of art, attaining an aura (cult value) of author. The aura of the choreographer was materializing in that exact moment. (Nevertheless, we must recognize, that it is perhaps abusi-ve to employ the same logic of mechanical reproduction, perceived so well by Benjamin within the audio-visual context, in the world of live shows. The above is merely a speculation.)

Let us return to the Rite, a work that keeps returning and has returned repea-tedly, a fact that may transform it into a work of the entire 20th century. Let us contemplate how a century of the Rite has brought us a certain dimension of the “eternal return of difference”, as proposed by Deleuze in his eminent book “Difference and repetition” published in 1968, a work that dialogues with

SIDE BSame old song, but different

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some of Nietzsche’s analysis. Deleuze shows us how one can only repeat that which is deferred, since “the wheel in the eternal return is, simultaneously, production of repetition from the difference and a selection of the difference from repetition”.1 That is, all the versions of the Rite are simultaneously the identity of the Rite as oeuvre (repetition) and its impossible Rite unit (version--variation that produces differences). That is, the return of a choreography would be a way to create the new from the differences, even if infinitesimal – variations in context and from the questioning of “why does this (still) inte-rest me?”

On the other hand, when one analysis the return of this erudite work about the ghosts of our culture, one would also need to recuperate Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) thought, a historian that attempted to explain the motivation ne-cessary to recover certain works of art in different historical moments, corres-pondingly in dialogue with Nietzsche’s thought. Warburg understood that the return of the forms was also possible through the return of a particular type of pathos (pathosformeln or pathos forms), which resulted from the incessant and historical battle between infatuated forces, which manifest danger, the mystery of belief and desire (in short, Dionysian forces), and on the other hand, a rhythmic suitability bearing a framing, context and structure (Apollo’s forces, represented by the notion of choreography, science, registry and the preservation of memory).

The return of a work would be caused by a conflict of forces that opened the inexhaustibility of the psychic unconscious. On one hand, the imaginative dri-ve, on the other, the conceptual siege (the construction of the works version). And in the midst of all this, one would find the energetic inversion logic of sense produced by the work – the sacrifice and the victory, the martyr and the relief of piety (for example, the Sacrificial Dance in The Rite of Spring). Isn’t sacrificing irresistibly fucktastic?

However, if one wants to rave even further about the dimension of imitation, repetition and return, and the escalation of the classics within art history, one must recover the work of Gabriel Tarde, a fascinating late 19th century socio-logist that severed my heart with his vision of imitative sociology, expanding our understanding of the idea of recuperation and psychological conflict in Warburg, or Benjamin’s notion of auratic transference. Gabriel Tarde argued that, “all repetition, social, vital, or physical (to consider only the most sa-lient and typical forms of universal repetition), springs from some innova-tion, just as every light radiates from some central point, and thus throughout science the normal appears to originate from the accidental.”2

1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, [London & New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 47-49.2 Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons, [New York: Henry Holt and Com-pany, 1903), p. 7.

Universal repetition? For Tarde, innovation and repetition are in reality two halves of a same movement. In his analysis of the laws of imitation, there are three main types of universal repetition, intertwined within the real: 1) the repetition of the physical world (periodic and vibratory movement that may be observed in the chemical, physical and astronomical world), 2) repetition through heredity from the animated world (an analogue relationship between species; histological bodily elements; hereditary and genetic transmission), 3) repetition through imitation in the social world: reproduction of an element in society trough imitation – habit, imitation-fad, imitation-obedience, imitation--instruction, imitation-education, or even, language as reproduction of a code.

In reality, the rapprochement between the physical, animated and human world proposes the same logics for some of the aspects of social life and the physical world, that is, society functions for the author as an organism. For example, Tarde argues that the epidemics of penance, luxury, gambling, stock market speculation, and Hegelianism or Darwinism could be human afflictions. Imagine then a world with a viral movement, where returning to an oeuvre, to paganism, to the renovation of historical ties with Russian pagan culture, as present in the work of Nicolas Roerich and the musical work of Stravinsky, would be an organic movement that arises from the movement of planetary repetition! The world played in velocity games, where the characters would say:

But there are also differences. If in the physical world repetition is periodical, tending towards intertwinement, and analogous or contiguous durations, in the case of repetition between social beings, the tendency is to separate, towards detachment and division amongst beings. Imitation does still better; its in-fluence is exerted not only over a great distance, but over great intervals of time. It establishes a pregnant relation between the inventor and his copier, separated as they may be by the thousands of years, […] between the Roman painter of a Pompeiian fresco and the modern decorator whom it has inspired. Imitation is generation at a distance.3

3 Ibidem, p. 34.

- PASSIONS WITHOUT GRAVITY, WHERE CAN YOU TAKE THE WITHOUT I? - DEAR MUSE WITHOUT I, HERE ONE NAVIGATES AS IF IN THE OCEAN, BUT NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IS A BOAT. WE NEED TO DIVE INTO THE POSSIBILI-TY OF NOT BEING SUBJECTS, CENTRES OF GRAVI-TY OF A WORLD THAT DOES NOT BELONG TO US.

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Through the above quotation, the copy and updating of a work of art would be partially explained: a movement of imitation at a distance, without the need to scour the entirety of art history, re-updating the pieces that awaken a certain historical moment, its context. All invention is then an answer to a problem.Under our initial question (what century was the 20th century and why does an oeuvre return?) the interesting thing would be to understand what would cause a certain invention to emerge in a certain moment and context, that is, why have certain problems been posed and how does one find certain solutions. Tarde described, for example, invention as an “individual initiative”, in order to explain the gesture that leads to the suspension of a certain course of events, producing a difference.

But the question in this text resides in the fact that most of the histories told about “individual initiatives” are based on fictional narratives about the degree of genius of its authors, or on mere commercial, political, military context re-lationships. We sang that song at the beginning of our text. Another hypothesis would be to explain invention retroactively. We also sang that song. It is diffi-cult to understand that our way of knowing may halt completely the possibility of unpredictability, since it only knows what it repeats, what is established as sense.

Tarde argued that humans tend to repeat and copy themselves, most of the times without even moving in order to accomplish it. Humans act upon each other, through indefinite distances, as molecules of seawater that do not need to move to move the sea. Even if only imitation has actual rules, since inven-tion already seems to belong to the marshy field of the arbitrary, it would be necessary to see each repetition as a micro-invention, that is, all repetition as difference. According to Tarde, “to exist is to defer”.4

What counts are not the individuals, but their relationships of association, repe-tition, opposition. In that sense, a repetition of The Rite of Spring, could even be a Counter-Imitation, since it is unnecessary to produce only similarities in order to emulate something. Imitation can be produced through a movement of opposition. What counts in the end end end, we argue, is the multiplications of visions, relationships and agents, that is, the contrary of a structural and causal vision of the events. It is necessary to repeat incessantly, amplifying our relationships of meaning with the past.

But repeat how and why?? One should consider our century, the 21st century of today, and how it reproduces and imitates compulsively, creating an almost me-chanical reproducibility of the individuals and their subjective variations. One should consider the current information society as an infinite composition of

4 Eduardo Viana Vargas, introduction [in Portuguese] to Monadologia e sociologia e outros ensaios, by Gabriel Tarde (Cosac Naify. São Paulo, 2007), p. 7.

analogous things, since each invention tends to propagate itself exponentially through the world. When something is generalized continuously and globally, where does the potency of differentiation lie? Is it healthy to the process of re-petition, for instance, to mine and oust competition and counter-imitation? That would be a hard-hitting interrogation towards our time, to its viral dimension, seen as contagion, as infinite reproduction of gestures and knowledge. A process of standardising tendency is underway, one that produces a civilization that is emulated at an exponential scale, liquidating all the other civilizations. A cer-tain Benjaminian thought concerning mechanicalness reaches us – the idea that it would be possible to attain an almost total reproducibility of those infinite va-riations of subjectivity, which would then remove efficiently the auratic weight of the “rare human being” and open inverse paths.

In order to end our reflexion, we return to one question that certainly went through our minds: which version of The Rite of Spring would be “ideal” in 2013? Is a contemporary version possible? On one hand, we can at last free our-selves, through the massive practice of repetition, variation and simulation, of the weight of being a “special being” (namely, the author). We can merely be. On the other hand, we have ousted heterogeneity and have created only a flat space, where all variations seem to be already-known, already-felt and alrea-dy-understood. What would then be the possible version of The Rite of Spring in 2013? A timid response would consist in saying that the dissolution of the aura, proposed by Benjamin, might be experiencing today a second historical moment. To repeat presently might not imply the affirmation of an authorial gesture, but on the contrary represent a fusion with words, steps, and rhythms of others. The second response would consist in saying that many of the 20th century classics come crashing today from the military aeroplanes of past wars. Concluding with a riddle of the sphinx:

TO SEE IS NOT ENOUGH. ONE NEEDS TO FLY OVER SEE. THAT IS THE LUCEIDITY1 OF OUR TIME. AEROPLANES, FOR WHAT?

1 luce - italian for light

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ON THE POSSI BILITY OF DAN CING TO DEATH

There are fairy tales around it. The Rite of Spring is one. The Red Shoes, ano-ther. Swan Lake, Giselle, they all tell a story of someone dancing to her or his death. Dancing to death is a romantic proposition. Who were they in the stories, why did they dance themselves to death? But I tell myself almost immediately that asking these questions would be to take the fictional structures around this motive as being real. I’d rather question the very concrete possibility of dancing to death, for anyone of us.

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ON THE POSSI BILITY OF DAN CING TO DEATH

1The proposition of dancing to death intrigues me for its seemingly seducti-ve and optimistic implications. If the process of dying is generally associated with suffering and helpless-ness, dancing is typically seen as a ple-asurable and willful act. In this light, dancing to death seems to indicate some paradoxical and radical process of dying, such as pleasurable death or pleasure all the way into death.

What would be the practical steps of dancing to death? There is a joke that I quite often tell my friends, which is about how to kill an elephant with a needle. How do you kill an elephant with a needle? Please take a moment to think. The answer goes: you poke the elephant until he dies, or you poke him just before he dies, or you poke him once and wait for him to die. Lau-ghter. Now if I take the lesson liberally from this joke, dancing to death would translate into: you dance until you die, or you dance just before you die, or you dance sometime and then wait to die. And I am tempted to take the interpretation of the first two, and say the practical meaning of dancing to death is: dancing for a length of time up until your death.

We know in the stories of The Red Shoes and The Rite of Spring, the dan-ce and eventual death from it, were fallen upon the victims, and that is the part of morbid excitement these sto-ries suggest of: the extreme hardship and extreme pleasure that they are forced to bear. (I wondered if extreme-

ness of dancing would lead to extre-meness of pleasure. But, since through time any body-originated pleasures are interchangeable with pain, so long as it lasted for a time, we know their dance too would have got its share of pain. Dancing to death would have been pleasure. Just not quite only.) I admit it, what I was thinking of at first was really forced pleasure to death, like in the sexual fantasies where one is tormented to have pleasure. In spe-culating dancing to death, I imagine dancing in total privacy where no one else matters but oneself. All the while, we know that dance is well embedded in the social functions and is a source of various pleasures of social kind, and it can generate pleasures in the dancer as much as in the spectators. Forcing someone to dance would be to make him render his private pleasures into social pleasures. In the case of The Red Shoes, it was a supernatural power that made the girl dance, against her own will. For the Chosen one in the Rite, it was not the dance itself that was forced upon her, but rather the acceptance of the decision to dance to death. Yes, under physical, psycho-logical and all other threats possible, I am sure, but it was the dancer that danced herself to death, not the Holy Spirit.

Even more than the will, I would like to add willingness in dance and death, without which dancing to death could only be an accident death. This makes my definition of dancing to death to be more like dancing willingly for a leng-th of time up until willing death. Like this, the proposal of dancing to death becomes truly seductive.

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2Dance marathoners in the 1920s and 30s in United States danced willingly for a very long length of time. Up until their unwilling death for some of them. Homer Moorehouse was one of the dance marathoners who, after dancing more than three days and three nights, suffered a heart attack and died. Dance marathons showcased how dancing could be turned into mi-sery for the dancers but entertainment for the spectators. Dance marathoners typically danced 45 minutes out of every hour day and night for weeks and months. The dancers often slept while dancing, complained the pain in the feet, legs, among other body ailments. Eventually, one by one, they collapsed from exhaustion and got disqualified for not ‘remaining in mo-tion’. The marathoners willingly joined the competition and willingly danced, except they did that for a prize and in spite of dancing. From this example, we could equally say dance leading up to death is displeasure and dancing to death is nothing more than suffering into death, which is identical to our usual association with death.

In what is called Dancing mania or Dancing plague, throughout the middle ages in Europe, a large number of people are known to have died from dancing. It is said that for unknown reasons, groups of people, someti-mes a mass, danced for days, weeks or even months, until collapsing with heart attack, stroke, exhaustion, re-sulting in the eventual deaths of many. Apparently it is a well-documented fact that the victims of Dancing mania

danced in spite of their wishes to stop and often asked others for help. Thou-gh there are many speculations around this, Dancing mania is often associated with mass hysteria of a religious sort, where people believed they could be punished and/or saved by dancing.

These are the only two real cases of people dancing to death that I came across, which makes all the dancing to death an accidental event and hardly a choice.

Gilles Deleuze, the philosopher, jum-ped out of his apartment window to his death. Buddhapala Bante, a Buddhist monk, rehearses the jumping off the cliff for the end of his life. Jain monks and nuns are known for their sophisti-cated art of fasting themselves to de-ath, gradual and painless, apparently. Scott Nearing, a lay intellectual, died that way too at the age of hundred. Willing deaths though not of dancing.

3 Various traditions seem to have ex-tensive rituals focused on the dying moments of a person, such as Tibetans or Egyptians. Even without particular beliefs, the moment of closing all that have happened in someone’s lifetime, and also the time leading up to it, is regarded as a special moment.

I doubt they would have the dying person dance in those rituals though. As spiritual as it can be, I think dance might not easily find its place within the dying person and amongst his preoccupations; at the moment when

39

the weight of his entire life heavily lies upon him; the moment when his links and connection to bodily functions fall away. After all, isn’t death, before anything else, the death of the body? Dancing would require from the person the physical facility to move and pro-duce sufficiently distinct sensations. I would also think dancing involves the whole body, however small the move-ments might be. Shouldn’t someone attempt such undertaking of dancing into their dying moments - at least, the most devoted dancers of Mary Wig-man, Martha Graham, or Anna Halprin? The wheelchair bound, hundred-year--old Kazuo Ono is known to have per-formed for his audience, dancing only with his hands. Yet I have no way of knowing if he danced on his deathbed. Speculating the possibility of dancing to death in the real, I come to think it has got to be a death not completely natural, or of old age, but at least a slightly premature death caused by

a shock, of an accidental nature. It would also have to involve a spiritual motivation, religious or secular, for it to be chosen as a way to conclude one’s life. Under these conditions, dancing to death would mean: a spiri-tually motivated, self-induced death by dancing by someone with yet enou-gh physical strength to dance.

4 Coming back to the tales, I better understand now why they are always about a young person who is forced to dance in an atmosphere of societal consensus. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Min Kyoung Lee09.2013

© Delal Isci

40

Imagine

you are born

old and you get younger

and younger until you become

a child, a fetus, and eventually dis-

-appear into egg and sperm and that’s

your death. Liveliness and beauty would

be seen very differently. Wrinkles would

be the sign of youth. Smooth skin would

cause in the viewer the anxiety of im

-

pending immaturity, followed by death.

The activeness and restle

ssness seen in

the young would be related to the mo-

vement of old. Inactivity of what we

know to be the old today would be seen

as the expressio

n of youth that keeps

things contained and grounded, instead

of uncontrollable, uncontrolled energy

fired into all directions in the sure sta

ge of decaying. When you see

your face getting

slowly more

and

more straightened, or

finding your hair starting

to get black (or brown or blon-

de), you know you are aging into

the childish oblivion. Seeing the you-

ng would make you thoughtful, as it

would remind you of the death getting

nearer. You would see genuine beauty

in the old features, wrinkles, round

backs, white hair, fat or skinny bodies

with flabby skin. You would pick and

get one of these beauties to be sacri-

ficed to death if you ever had to, and

feel the sense of regret seeing them

dance, thinking : “Another life in its

full blossom is about to go wasted,

along with its beauty and glory.’’ Once

s/he starts to dance, s/he won’t get

exhausted and collapse, but

levitate and explode

into the thin

41

Imagine

you are born

old and you get younger

and younger until you become

a child, a fetus, and eventually dis-

-appear into egg and sperm and that’s

your death. Liveliness and beauty would

be seen very differently. Wrinkles would

be the sign of youth. Smooth skin would

cause in the viewer the anxiety of im

-

pending immaturity, followed by death.

The activeness and restle

ssness seen in

the young would be related to the mo-

vement of old. Inactivity of what we

know to be the old today would be seen

as the expressio

n of youth that keeps

things contained and grounded, instead

of uncontrollable, uncontrolled energy

fired into all directions in the sure sta

ge of decaying. When you see

your face getting

slowly more

and

more straightened, or

finding your hair starting

to get black (or brown or blon-

de), you know you are aging into

the childish oblivion. Seeing the you-

ng would make you thoughtful, as it

would remind you of the death getting

nearer. You would see genuine beauty

in the old features, wrinkles, round

backs, white hair, fat or skinny bodies

with flabby skin. You would pick and

get one of these beauties to be sacri-

ficed to death if you ever had to, and

feel the sense of regret seeing them

dance, thinking : “Another life in its

full blossom is about to go wasted,

along with its beauty and glory.’’ Once

s/he starts to dance, s/he won’t get

exhausted and collapse, but

levitate and explode

into the thin air.

42

appropriatedby João dos Santos Martins

I was never told to do this exercise at Dance School. In traditional art education, you always learn by copying and in choreography you don’t. In a class Chic Corea gave at the City Theatre, he told a stu-dent that the best way of learning was by copying your favourite pia-nists. Play a record and copy, copy and copy until you can do it by yourself and transcend it. At the Dance School they ask you to lock yourself alone in a classroom in order to create: find your inner voi-ce, unique and unrepeatable. In the meeting with the people from “Colectivo” we talked about appropriation. How traditional artwork is influenced by a previous one or by a master. How this understan-ding of art is pre-capitalist and dilutes the idea of originality asso-ciated with an individual. Creation doesn’t work that way, because we always work by synthesizing works of others that have influen-ced us, consciously or unconsciously. To deny authorship is to deny the brand, it’s a political position against intellectual property.

Magdalega Leite about her performance Cover (2010)in http://unroadbook.wordpress.com/cover-de-magdalena-leite/

revised by José Luís Neves

The history of appropriation in dance harks back to the 1960s and is closely linked to the New York collective Judson Dance Theater. Influenced by the techniques used in visual arts, particularly the concepts of collage and ready-made, choreographers working during that period translated those practices into the inclusion of external and pre-existing gestures in their choreographies. Of course that appropriating materials, aesthetics and gestures has always been a component of our existence, the latter already being an act of appropriation in itself. However, Judson choreographers used them as a discursive practice, which positioned them in relation to the aesthetic paradigm of modernity, particularly in regards to the ideology of self-expression in dance, of

which they were contemporaries – hence, they have been described, demagogically, as post-modern. One of the leading figures of the period was Yvonne Rainer, who used in her choreographic practice elements of “daily life”, quotes from other choreogra-phies, reproductions of figurative elements from collected photographs, among others. A perfect example of this type of work is her celebrated piece, Trio A, not only due to the use of the elements mentioned above, but mainly because the choreogra-phy was promoted as a piece that could be learned by anyone, with or without dance experience, “professionals” or “amateurs“. The work became an enormous democratic gesture, which reallocated the traditional subjugation of dance to ultra-mechanical

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bodies with great technical discipline (a discipline that Rainer had as well acquired during her physical training under Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham). Later on, while watching impromptu reproductions of her choreography, it became inevitable for Rainer not to recognize her authorship, since some of the interpretations misused entirely the principles that composed the work. This made Rainer reconsider her initial gesture, and consequently not facilitating the chore-ography’s free circulation. Rainer annulled the gesture that she had liberated and that raised questions about ownership, copyright and transmission, all issues inherent to the choreographic medium, which called it - and still do - into question.

In contrast with the materialization of an object that resides autonomously in itself, the choreographic object is ontologically dependent of its performance. The choreo-graphic object does not derive solely from the regime of the spatially visible, but from that temporal space that requires an agent to be “expressed”. Consequently, the body is usually revealed as the medium of dance. But the medium of dance is not the body, but rather the choreography acting as the institution that dictates its own enactment. Although choreography is independent in itself, it remains inevitably dependent of an expressive agent, which translates and in-terprets it. The body would be just a single possibility to make spatiotemporally visible the invisibility of the choreographic “law”.

Take for instance our own project. For this version of Sacre we tried to collect a considerable number of choreographies representing certain aesthetic statements of dance practices during the 20th and 21st century. Many of those have been lost forever, for example, Nijinsky, Horton and Wigman’s1 choreographies. Others have been fully documented, notated, video recorded or photographed. Some are safely stored in remote library departments, while others are waiting to be discovered in the house

1 A reconstruction of Wigman’s Frühlingsweihe was attempted last year by Henrietta Horn, along with Susan Barnett and Katharine Sehnert.

of descendants. Some have become public domain on the Internet, others are privately available on the Internet, and some are protected against the tyranny of plagiarism, others, older ones, are part of national archives and are public property. This means that the latter are actually choreographies that, by law, by right, can be learned, enac-ted by anyone and also publicly displayed, free of charge, and of guilt.

As previously stated, the work of Nijinsky, contrarily to that of Roerich and Stravinsky, was lost. Not because of a whim, but probably due to a lack of it (one can only speculate about it!). During the 1980s, after Nijinsky’s death, and that of most of the dancers that first performed the work, as well as with many of the original spectators still alive, Millecent Hodson, in collaboration with the fashion and set designer Kenneth Archer, decided to initiate a quest for the lost work. Obviously, the quest was useless, for there was nothing to be found. Their work was to combine the creation of a new work using Nijinsky’s style with the recons-truction of present memories, not past ones. Over time, after more than 20 years since the premiere of the work in 1987, the reconstruction became the myth of a myth, often associated with Nijinsky himself. Even the official video of the Joffrey Ballet, which co-produced the first version of the work, includes Nijinsky’s name as choreographer in the initial credits, with the additional infor-mation that Millecent Hodson reconstructed the choreography. Obviously, the choreo-graphy is not that of Nijinsky, but Hodson’s, in the style, or inspired, or whatsoever, by Nijinsky’s potential choreography, or better said, what she envisaged as being Nijinsky’s choreography. A publication exceeding 200 pages was published by the authors, in an attempt to ascertain the precision and exactitude of their choices, without any compromise, notwithstanding the falla-cious arguments that their work was not a reconstruction of the original, but a singular version that wanted to be close to Nijinsky’s 1913 version of the Rite.

44

One can not discredit the remarkable and significant research Hodson carried out, it is somehow unfortunate that the choreogra-pher did not author the work, using instead Nijinksy’s name to give credibility to the inevitable inexactness of her reconstruction, which can only resemble Nijinsky’s work through aesthetical coincidence (as claimed by the choreographer Dominique Brun). Hodson’s construction, although promoted as a re-construction, continues to be dissemina-ted and assumed as being Nijinsky’s original choreography, when it is common knowle-dge that the Russian choreographer did not leave any documentation about the ballet. Nijinsky’s daughter, Tamara, and his grandson Vaslav Markevitch have denounced this fact. Both have struggled to be legitimized as copyright holders of Nijinsky’s name in connection to Hodson/Archer’s version of the work. Needless to say, this is not just a mat-ter of copyright and recognition, but also a monetary issue, since the legal battle invol-ves financial aspects associated with the use of Nijinsky’s name in the international sales and representations of Sacre. After 26 years of non-authorized use of Nijinsky’s name, his descendants were awarded this year partial copyright for Nijinsky’s work, restructuring the lobby that surrounds the Rite, a group of faceless names and monetary transactions.This imbroglio is also part of our own working process. Léonide Massine created his own version of Le Sacre du Printemps in 1920, in which Martha Graham was the chosen maiden (in 1930). This version was also reconstructed in the La Scala theatre in Milan, in 1948. The dress rehearsal for these performances was recorded in a silent black and white film, which is now available at the New York Public Library for the Performing

Arts. There is also a notated score publicly available in Paris, done by Massine. We tried to contact the copyright holders of Massine’s work, his descendants. They demonstrated an interest in supporting our use of Massine’s choreography. They also informed us they did not hold any documentation files on the ballet and that we should contact the New York Public Library directly. After we readjusted our communication efforts, the research specialists at the Library confirmed they could make a copy of the film and post it to our address. However, it was expressly necessary to obtain: a written permission by Massine’s three heirs, a declaration of honour in which we agreed to not upload the video on the internet, the payment of $100 (76€) for the rental of the work, as well as the payment of the costs, approximately $600 (455€), inherent to the conversion of the film into a digital copy. In addition to all this, we received another e-mail from the Massine Estate, requesting the payment of 200€ for each show, which included four minutes of Massine’s choreography (7x200€ = 1,400€). Due to all the unexpected costs, and also the slowness of the process, when compared with the short amount of time we had to prepare the piece, we decided to bypass official procedures. We were able to find other solutions to facilitate the process: we asked a friend in New York to go to the library to watch the recording and translate it into a score that she could then enact, she would record the dance on video and send it to us, we would then translate the registra-tion into our own bodies. Our solution failed, since our envoy was told she also had to request an official permission to watch the film in the library.

Appropriation of visual objects is often done by transferring the object into the same ma-terial of the appropriated object, inferring that its interpretation diverges in relation to the context of its presentation, and parti-cularly through its reception by an external agent. However, in dance, appropriation is in itself limited to the incorporation by another agent, namely, the dancer. The transformation occurs not only conceptually, but also at the level of the medium that will be associated to the reception context

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of the work. The appropriation that pop artist Beyoncé made of Thierry De Mey’s film based on Anne Teresa de Keers-maeker’s choreography Rosas danst Rosas, which reactivated the discussion about authorship, intellectual property, copyri-ght, appropriation and citation within a public context, is a perfect example of the above. Obviously, one can analyse the incident as a “generalist appropriation, akin to any proper capitalist system”2, even if Beyoncé characterized the project as a “tribute” and “inspiration”. What is then the ethical legitimacy of Beyoncé to “reproduce” Keersmaeker gesture? The problem seems hopeless, since the tradition of conceptual art throughout the entire twentieth century was all based on appropriation and citation. But Beyoncé is not a conceptual artist. Keersmaeker’s stated the following about the affair: “A few months ago, I saw on Youtube a clip where schoolgirls in Flanders are dancing Rosas danst Rosas to the music of Like a Virgin by Madonna. And that was touching to see. But with global pop culture it is different, does this mean that thirty years is the time that it takes to recycle non-mainstream experimental performan-ce? And, what does it say about the work of Rosas danst Rosas? In the 1980s, this was seen as a statement of girl power, based on assuming a feminine stance on sexual expression. I was often asked then if it was feminist. Now that I see Beyoncé dancing it, I find it pleasant but I don’t see any edge to it. It’s seductive in an entertaining consumerist way.”3 The pro-blem here seems to concern the means, context, and intention of production. The problematic aspects of Beyoncé’s appro-priation are not only related to the millio-naire income deriving from the “intellec-tual” property of an “experimental” artist who, one must stress, also commercializes her own choreographies. The problem, it seems, is mostly related with Beyoncé’s – along with her production team -

2 Excerpt of a Skype conversation with Rita Natálio3 Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - October 10th, 2011, in http://www.stubru.be/programmas/zetmopsiska/beyoncevsanneteresadekeersmaeker

transformation of Keersmaeker’s intetion, converting it into a sexist approach, where women are seen as objects of desire and sensuality, when on the other hand, Keersmaeker explores the concept of femininity as a choreographic construc-tion. Beyoncé’s appropriation reproduces the same movements of Keersmaeker’s choreography, however it fetishizes them, imparting a logic of reproduction that does not question its own construction, while Keersmaeker tries to deconstruct the movements associated with the social construction of certain kind of subjectivitiy.

Months later, and perhaps as a result of this incident, Keersmaeker launched the program Re:Rosas, in which she proposes to transmit Rosas danst Rosas choreo-graphy to whomever wishes to learn it, encouraging anyone to make their own versions of the piece and upload their videos online. This initiative seems to be interconnected with Yvonne Rainer’s ges-ture back in the 60’s, mentioned above. In this case, dissemination is facilitated by a global medium - video diffusion through the World Wide Web. However, Keers-maeker’s gesture is the ideological opposi-te of Rainer’s intents, or of Tino Seghal’s contemporary work, authors whose work requires a body-to-body transmission, reinforcing immaterial contact. In Le Sacre du Printemps (2013), we appropriate and embody excerpts of diffe-rent choreographic versions of The Rite of Spring, including Rainer’s, who has given her express consent. Two methodologies form the basis of our work: if documenta-tion of the work was publically available, we would use those documents without the consent of the authors/representa-tives. If documentation was not in the “public domain”, we would then contact the artists/associates, initiating a dialo-gue that would allow us to reach our end goal. Xavier le Roy, Laurent Chétouane, Olga Roriz, Yvonne Rainer and MyChoreo-graphy collective accepted our challenge. In other cases, the quotation of works was refused for a variety of reasons:

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Dear [choreographer’s name],

Greetings from Montpellier, France.

We hope this e mail finds you well. We found your contact in [name of location]. We are writing to you in regards to [name of the piece] as we would like to quote it in our new performance Le Sacre du printemps (2013).

Let us first introduce ourselves: our names are Min and João, choreographers from Korea/New Zealand and Portugal. We have studied together and graduated this year from ex.e.r.ce master program, under the direction of Mathilde Monnier, at the Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, France. We are now preparing a new dance creation of Le Sacre du Printemps to present this autumn at Circular Festival in Vila do Conde, Culturgest in Lisbon, and the municipal theatre of the city of Santarém, in Portugal.

We are seeking for your permission and assistance to use an excerpt from your choreography [name of the piece] in our new performance. We are interested in creating a performative archive and living museum of the choreographic works (does this sound like we are going to make an exhibition? - it will be in a performance!) of The Rite of Spring from the last 100 years. Our performance aspires to put side to side, or face to face, distinct aesthetic paradigms of last century’s dance produc-tion, put in evidence through the lens of the interpretation of a single work, itself nonexistent.

We believe your choreographic work to have been of a special significance in the de-lineation of dance history and of extreme relevance in shaping contemporary dance, therefore consider it totally necessary to include a quotation of [name of the piece] as part of our archival performance.

For this purpose, we would also like to ask you to kindly allow us an access to the documentation of the choreography of [name of the piece], such as a video file, or a DVD. We will be very grateful to receive a copy of it by post or Internet link, or you can let us know how to obtain it, if commercially available. We have no other way of accessing the choreography.

We would much appreciate your help or further information on this.

Thank you for taking your time to read this mail and please let us know if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you, and thank you in advance for your consideration.

The following is a very short description of our project, biographies and performan-ce credits, and we also have attached a file with a longer description of the project for your reference.

With our warmest regards and hoping to proceed with your collaboration,

Yours sincerely,Min Kyoung Lee and Joao dos Santos Martins

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askdwçepfionoenwiuediuZ 16 de Julho de 2013 às 14:39Para João Martins <jdossmartins@gmail.com>Dear João,I am afraid that your project cannot include an excerpt of Michael Clark's Mmm...(1992) or Mmm...(2006) and become part of your repertoire. We are in the process of creating Michael Clark Archive, a Living Archive. We would like to use our own archived material toward the creation of new work.Wishing you all very best,Ellen

Janet Wong <jwong@newyorklivearts.org> 10 de Julho de 2013 às 17:08Para min kyoung lee <oncemin@gmail.com>Cc: João Martins <jdossmartins@gmail.com>Hello,Thank you for your interest in our work. After discussing your request with my co-directors Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart, we have decided to decline. Our reason being that A Rite is a collaboration between a dance company and a theatre company and quoting an excerpt from the dance will not represent the work. We wish you the best in your ambitious and interesting endeavour.yours truly,Janet

Hoghe Raimund <raimund.hoghe@gmx.net> 9 de Julho de 2013 às 20:05Para min kyoung lee <oncemin@gmail.com>Cc: João Martins <jdossmartins@gmail.com>, zvonimir dobrovic <zvonimir.dobrovic@gmail.com>,"isabelladicola@libero.it" <isabelladicola@libero.it>Dear Min Kyoung Lee,Thank you very much for your interest in my work but I can't give you the permission to take excerpts from my choreography of "Sacre - The Rite of Spring". It's a very personal version of the piece and connected with our bodies and different backgrounds. Therefore there is no way for me to give the choreography or parts of it to other people. Thanks for understanding and respecting my rights as choreographer.All the bestRaimund HogheP. S. I send this email in copy to my management. They also take care of my rights as author.Am 09.07.2013

John Tomlinson <jt@ptdc.org> 16 de Julho de 2013 às 07:49Para min kyoung lee <oncemin@gmail.com>Cc: João Martins <jdossmartins@gmail.com>Dear Min Kyoung Lee,I did receive your e mail one week ago and gave it to Mr. Taylor for his consideration.After careful review Mr. Taylor has decided not to have his work included in your project.Thank you for considering Mr. Taylor's work in what sounds like a very interesting adventure.Sincerely,john tamnoeihsd

48

On one hand, we expected negative responses but, on the other, we could not anticipate the different reasons choreogra-phers would give for the refusal. We tried to evaluate them in order to understand how our communication may have been deficient and, furthermore, to understand how our own views were different from those of the choreographers.

Firstly we thought the refusals could be related to the linguistic formulation of the text. In our e-mail, we mentioned clearly our intention to cite the choreographer’s work. However, we formulated it as a question, asking for their permission and assistance. We transformed a support request into a matter of authorization, underrating our appropriation work. Therefore, we may have legitimized “copyright transfer”; despite the fact we were firmly opposed to the premise of “copyright” and intellectual property.

A second moment of speculation emerges due to the lack of trust of the choreogra-phers when confronted with our contact. Since we are unknown in the artistic milieu, artists may have become sceptical about our proposal to transform their choreographic work. On the other hand, there seems to exist an ambiguity in the interpretation of how the word “quotation” is used. In this case, the artists associated the term with synecdoche, linking a referential form with a concept of representing their work through a single excerpt, as if it could represent or

make justice to the whole work. The inten-tion behind the act of quotation is linked to how different aesthetics express themselves, hence, the various excerpts selected could not represent the work of the choreographer that created it, but only quote those same choreographers through the materials they created to represent an idea of the Rite.

Perhaps, this would be the ideal moment to recall Barthes’ essay on the death of the author. It is true that the mere incorporation of an idea cannot truly represent its concep-tual counterpart. The author dies in the act of producing the visible. In our case, most authors died seven times before we commit-ted suicide: when they materialized their choreographies, when they enacted them, when they video recorded their performan-ces, when we watched the recordings, when we translated the choreographies from the videos, when we danced them and, last but not least, when we introduced them within the context of our performance.

Earlier in the text we quoted an excerpt from Magdalena Leite’s production-note-book, an Uruguayan choreographer living and working in Mexico City. In her performance Cover (2010), she uses as a reference for her creation Yvonne Rainer’s 16mm film of Trio A, recorded in 1996. In this work Leite appro-priates the musical concept of cover version to create a version of Rainer’s work. In 2012, she created a new version of Cover (2010) entitled Futurist:

What can be projected from the past into the future? The cover inside the cover. A year after (...) I have to present the same piece in the second edition of the same event. The eternal return ... Like a mirror game, I copy myself copying Yvonne Rainer. This time, the theme of Re/Posiciones is the previous future. What can be projected from the past into the future? While I was reworking the piece, the creator of Megaupload was arrested, a fact that made me question the possibility of the Internet not being able to contain all the information it was able to provide before. The brutal democratization process linked to the capability of finding everything on the web was threatened. This encouraged me to create the second version.For this version, I’m completely submerged in fiction. The action takes place in 2040 and I am convicted for plagiarism. The political discourse becomes as radical as the aesthetic discourse. (...) I tell my story from prison, I recall Cover and show it. The “legal version” is added to the “emotional” and “glamour” versions.(...) The “legal version” is based on the notion of chrestomathy, when one can copy a few seconds of an exis-ting material without the risk of plagiarism. In the “legal version”, I wear handcuffs and perform the first 20 seconds of the solo. I also perform the legal version of the No Manifesto. Hypothetically, one can quote a pre-existing text if one changes it substantially. In my work I convert it to jeringonza1 and read it aloud. This is not a tribute.” Magdalena Leite, May 2012, in http://unroadbook.wordpress.com/cover-de-magdalena-leite/

1 Spanish language game played by children in Spain and all over Latin America. It consists of adding the letter p after each vowel of a word, and repeating the vowel. For example, Carlos turns into Cápar-lopos. In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeringonza

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Roerich was known as an esoteric man of power - he possesed a Chi-tamani stone, which is meant to be a piece from a bigger (rather

small) asteroid that originally fell on the Mongolian Altai mou-ntains. Does this ressemble the sacred stone where the sacrifice of the

Rite would take place? Found the missing alien of the fake representa-tion of Russian culture!

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BIOGRAPHIESCAROL BROWN is a choreographer and artistic director whose work explores the cracks between art forms. Working in sustained collaborations, her body of work has evolved through dialogue and experimentation in diverse settings including urban, architectural and theatrical environments in response to questions of space, belonging and identity. Ca-rol studied expressive dance with Shona Dun-lop-MacTavish and Jan Bolwell in Dunedin and completed a History Honours degree at Otago University before leaving New Zealand for Europe where, with composer Russell Scoones, she established Carol Brown Dances during a residency at the Place Theatre London. The company has toured extensively throughout Europe, North and South America and been presented by major festivals including Roma Europe, Dance Umbrella, Brighton Festival and 4+4 Days in Motion. Carol has been commis-sioned to create large scale works for urban contexts in Barcelona, Athens, Perth, Prague, Woking and London. Awards for choreography include a Jerwood Prize and the Ludwig Forum International Prize for Innovation. Carol has a PhD in choreography and is an Associate Pro-fessor in Dance at the University of Auckland. The mother of two boys with partner Russell Scoones, she lives in West Auckland.

DELAL ISCI nasceu em 1989 na Turquia, vive e trabalha em Viena d’Áustria. Estudou escultu-ra e instalação com Judith Heumer e Florian Reither na Academia de Belas-Artes de Viena. Em 2011 foi responsável pela instituição da Freie Klasse na Academia de Belas Artes de Viena, um coletivo independente que trabalha sobre questões da representação em arte e teoria crítica a partir do desenvolvimento de projetos de orientação prática. Delal trabalha na interseção entre produção artística e teo-ria política em diferentes medias.

CHRIS JANNIDES (PhD) was the founder of the pioneering NZ dance company, Limbs. Chris then went on to create a second company in Australia, Darc Swan, whose focus was primarily dance-in-education. On returning to New Zealand, he was Head of Dance at Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts in Au-ckland for 9 years before relocating to the UK to complete a practice-based PhD. His docto-rate produced a system called the bodymA-PP, which is a movement improvisation tool derived from a close analysis of pedestrian activity. Now living in Wellington, Chris is a full-time movement tutor at Toi Whakaari, the NZ Drama School, where he is developing its movement curriculum, as well as using his doctoral research as a teaching tool for the training of both actors and dancers.

Born in the Netherlands in 1976, JOSÉ LUÍS NEVES is a photo-historian and translator. He obtained a Translation Degree at the European University in 2001 and since then has been involved in translation, localization and publication for international audiences. During the course of his translation career, he has collaborated with several global cultural institutions and translation agencies. José is currently living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he is concluding a PhD exploring the historical and critical intersections between photobook and artist’s book production.

JOÃO DOS SANTOS MARTINS was born in 1989, in Portugal. He has studied dance and choreo-graphy in various institutions across Europe and works as a performer and choreographer since 2008. He created Le Sacre du Printemps (2013) with Min Kyoung Lee, Masterpiece (2014) and Continued Project (2015). He collaborated in Tropa Fandanga (2014) by Teatro Praga and in “Retrospective” by Xavier Le Roy (2012-2014). He is currently performing in Estzer Salamon’s Monument 0 (Haunted by wars 1913-2013) and preparing a new collaboration “Self-titled” premiering in Portugal next October.

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New Zealand based artist KRISTIAN LARSEN is an award winning choreographer, new perfor-mance artist, and essayist/blogger. A graduate of three of New Zealand’s key dance institu-tions (UNITEC-PAS, The New Zealand School of Dance, and the University of Auckland). Larsen has worked extensively as a performer and collaborator with and for internationally renowned artists including Jerome Bel (Fran-ce), Lemi Poinfasio (NZ/Europe) Ko Nakajima (Japan), Hans Van Den Broeck (Belgium), Min Tanaka (Japan), Magpie Music Dance Company (Netherlands). Paul Pinson (Scotland),, and istheatere (Australia). Larsen is an artistic di-rector for a new interdisciplinary improvisation ensemble, Shameless Crowd Pleaser.

RITA NATÁLIO was born in Lisbon in 1983. She studied History at Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Choreography at Université Paris 8. As a performer she studied at Fó-rum Dança, completing the Choreographic Research Program in 2006 (Lisbon). She is primarily active in the fields of dramaturgy and accompaniment of artistic and rese-arch projects. She has collaborated with João Fiadeiro, Vera Mantero, Cláudia Dias, Guilherme Garrido, Pieter Ampe, António Pedro Lopes, Marianne Baillot, and João Lima. Since 2008, she has been developing her own work - “Nothing of what we have said so far had to do with me, I don’t un-derstand and I am afraid of understanding”, “The world scares me with its planets and cockroaches”, and “You can’t see me but it’s a portrait”. She has also worked at RE.AL, coordinating and assisting training/research projects and has taught in the Choreographic Creation and Dance Rese-arch Training Program at Forum Dança in Lisbon. She collaborates in documentation projects connected with performing arts. Rita Natálio is part of Sweet and Tender Collaborations.

MIN KYOUNG LEE has been working as a dan-ce/performance maker and performer since 2004 in New Zealand, Europe and Korea. She has BA in Chinese Philosophy (Sun-gkyunkwan University, Korea) and Contem-porary dance (Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand) and MA in Choreographic Studies at Centre Chorégraphique Nationale Montpellier/Montpellier 3 University (France). In her recent works, Min’s been exploring the interior of the performer on stage, as-sembling in theatre with the attention to the role of ideology, playing/performing oneself, and performing complex thoughts. Min performed and presented her own and collaborative works in various venues and festivals around Europe, New Zealand and Korea such as Korea National Contemporary Dance Company (Seoul), Culturgest (Lisbon), Circular Festival (Vila de Conde), Campo (Gent), Théâtre de la Cité Internationale (Paris), Fete de la Musique festival (Geneva), Festival NagiB (Maribor), Akademie Scholss Solitude (Stuttgart), Museum of Contem-porary Art Vojvodina (Novi sad), Prisma Forum (Mexico city) and many others. She performed for various choreographers among whom are Xavier le Roy, Anna MacRae, Tho-

MELANIE HAMILTON is freelance produ-cer, performer and dramaturg. She is a co-founder of Muscle Mouth, a multidisci-plinary performance company based in New Zealand that presents work directed by Ross McCormack. The company’s first major dance work AGE was commissioned by the 2014 New Zealand Festival, and their next work, Triumphs and Other Alternatives, premières in April 2015. A graduate of the New Zealand School of Dance, Melanie performed most recently with Barba-rian Productions in White Elephant, and continues to collaborate with independent companies and artists in New Zealand.

mas Ferrands, Carol Brown, Shona McCullagh, Clare Luiten. Min is a co-founder and an actively in-volved member of Sweet and Tender Collaborations, a network of international artist, since 2007.Min is a recipient of scholarship/fund from danceWEB Europe, Creative New Zealand Professio-nal Development, Todd Foundation, Asia New Zealand Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship and others. Most recently she presented her new performance ‘Karaoke Peace’ in Seoul as part of the Festival Bom 2015.

The touring of The Rite of Spring (2013) is made possible with the support and colla-boration of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Consulate General of Portu-gal in Sydney, Unitec Department of Performing and Screen Arts in Auckland, Al-len Hall/Theatre Studies of the University of Otago, BATS Theatre in Wellington.

conception and performance Min Kyoung Lee & João dos Santos Martins special guests Carol Brown, Chris Jannides, Kristian Larsen, Melanie Hamilton (NZ version), António Pedro Lopes, Gustavo Ciríaco, Bojana Bauer, Verónica Metello (PT version), Se-Hyung Oh, Lee Ji-Hyun (KR version) light design in collaboration with Daniel Worm d’Assumpção & Ricardo Campos visual art in collaboration with Delal Isci essay Rita Natálio translations José Luís Neves residencies DeVIR/CAPa, O Espaço do Tempo support Centre Chorégraphique Nacional Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon, TSB/VIVER SANTARÉM/MUNÍCIPIO DE SANTARÉM, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Cão Solteiro production João dos Santos Martins, Min Kyoung Lee production support and difusion Circular Associação Cultural special acknowledgment to the authors who assisted the quotation of their works Laurent Chétouane, Olga Roriz, Xavier Le Roy, Yvonne Rainer, Amanda Apetrea, Johan Thelander, Mårten Spångberg acknowledg-ment to the authors whose works are quoted Laurent Chétouane, Olga Roriz, Xavier Le Roy, Yvonne Rainer, Halla Olafsdottir, Amanda Apetrea, Johan Thelander, Sidney Leoni, Mårten Spångberg, Pina Bausch, Martha Graham, Maurice Béjart, Min Tanaka, Millicent Hodson acknowledgements Moriah Evans, Renata Piotrovska, Maria José Fazenda, Rita Natálio, Vivien Wood, Jeliça Šumič-Riha, Naima Pretov, Joowon Song, Diana Martins, Léon Tan, Susan Manning, Ellen Van Schuylenburch, André e. Teodósio, John Tomlinson, Theodor Massine, Lorca Massine, Janet Wong, Antonia Lahmé, Do-minique Brun, Lijing Sun, Frank van de Ven, Dinis Machado, Josep Caballeros, Rafael Martins, Vera Knolle, Raimund Hoghe, Paula Caspão, Liliana Coutinho, Joana Dilão, Alexandra Balona, Raewyn Whyte, Rin Ishihra, José Luís Neves, Paula Sá Nogueira, Manuel João Martins, Paulo Couto special acknowledgements for NZ tour Sofia Bata-lha, Susana Teixeira-Pinto, Paul Young, Moyra Brown, Raewyn Whyte premiere Circu-lar Festival de Artes Performativas, Vila do Conde - in co-presentation with Alkantara and the support of Départs/Culture Program of European Union (28/09/2013) other presentations Culturgest, Lisbon (4,5,6/10/2013) Teatro Municipal Sá da Bandeira, Santarém (10,11,12/10/2013) Korean National Company of Comtemporary Dance, Seoul (18/11/2014)