A performance for the 2007 Paris Festival d'Automne of The Rite of Spring, or Le Sacre du Printemps, the seminal work by Igor Stravinsky, set me to thinking about dance and so-called "serious" music in general. It was a one man dance performance by Xavier Le Roy, whose cerebral art was put on display at the Centre Pompidou on a bare, black stage. I enjoyed his subtle interpretation of the music, in which his feet rarely lifted off the stage, but felt oddly unsatisfied, thinking about the very different circumstances of the premier of this work almost one hundred years ago, right here in Paris.
In 1913, at the Theatre des Champs-Elysées, Pierre Monteaux conducted with the composer in the audience. The music was put together with a ballet choreographed by the young Nijinsky, the lover of the director of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. That premier caused a famous riot, as the audience booed and hissed at the clashing dissonances and the wild dynamics of the score. The choreography also caused a scandal, possibly as much for its ineptness as for its revolutionary qualities. Maybe Nijinsky was in over his head, (as Stravinsky opined in his autobiography) having gotten the commission from his lover, even though he lacked the training and experience that one would have expected. Stravinsky was reportedly appalled by the dance, and was also dissatisfied with a later version. He said in later years that he preferred The Rite of Spring as a concert piece. Still, no matter what Stravinsky thought about the quality of the choreography, he could have been rightly proud of the power of this whole mise-en-scene to upset the status-quo. There were two dynamics at work here, the iconoclasm of the work and the intellectualization of the art that came together in a brilliant way.
It's difficult to imagine a similar situation of scandal arising from a ballet or concert in today's art world. We feel too liberated for that, and with our analytical aesthetic, we would not allow ourselves to be shocked by much of anything. Yet, we are still bound by some very ironclad restrictions. Now, as ever, these limitations concern "good taste". And the conservative, low-keyed interpretation of the music offered by Xavier Le Roy's tasteful performance seems to bear this out. The wild expressionism of Nijinsky's dance is no more welcome in today's world than it was then, though for different reasons: then it was unconventional, now it is simply bad taste. I wonder if we have come full circle, allowing the spirit of rebellion, experimentation and intellectual analysis of art that was so much alive during the Twentieth Century to bring us to yet another crisis of inspiration. We believe that we know what good art is, but do we know what is pleasure in art?
I believe that a basic problem that "serious" art has had in the Twentieth Century is the elitism and detachment from popular culture that was a necessary part of the experimentation. In previous times, opera, symphonic music and ballet had borrowed unself-consciously from popular forms, and were thus continually enriched but also permanently anchored to the most basic principles of aesthetics. Westerners needed to get away from those anchors in order to find new inspiration. However, when art became cerebral and excruciatingly self-conscious, with 12 tone compositions and elaborate rationales for canvases painted white at the museum, we also became increasingly suspicious of the primordial pleasures that art give us, leading us further and further off-course. How is it possible that in a world filled with innumerable musical traditions that live and interbreed in a flourishing international scene, we can no longer produce lyric opera that strikes a balance between high art and heartfelt pleasure? How is it that the wild foot stamping dances of the 1913 Rite of Spring have been reduced here to one man in jeans conducting a phantom orchestra on a bare stage? This in a world where dance styles have multiplied and morphed in wild fecundity for the entire past century? Or that in a world that produces billions of photographic images of every type every day, monochrome canvases sport price tags of millions of dollars? In the Twentieth Century experimentation took us away from the popular traditions, freeing us from obsolete traditions, but also blinding us to the art around us and eventually leading us into an increasingly sterile room, Hopefully the Twenty First Century will bring us out of this impasse, and the arts will once again find their people.
Dominic Ambrose is a writer and script-reader living in Paris. Take a look at his website at http://dominicambrose.wordpress.com/ or at his new art blog at http://ambroseartgallery.wordpress.com/
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