1940's Rites of Spring

The rites of spring 1940's were a special time. For the boys of the city cold winter meant school. If there was a good snow we had our snowball fights and long long hills to sled down. We even worked out a way to hook onto the car bumpers to get a tow back up to say 10th street (10th & Dupont - Wilmington, Del). Most of the winter though was taken up with hangin- out when you could, school, and home.

As the days started getting longer and warmer a stirring to spend more quality time outside welled up in all of us. Spring had sprung and it was time to set in motion those things we did since time began for us. I can't remember the exact order but it went something like this.

Late March - Early April: The kite flying time. Kites ranged anywhere in price from ten cents to a quarter. most of us got the ten centers. And of course you needed string and a tail. My Dad worked at a factory where he had "access" to very large spools of nylon string. Man, I could put a kite a mile out. And, that was neat, because as the wind died down and the kite began to sink it took everything you had to get that kite back to you before the thing went down somewhere. It was always a neat past time. Kids would gather together run up the kites with each one trying to out do the other. And, windy days of early spring were ideal for kite flying.

Mid April - Early May: As sure as an atomic clock the kites disappeared and out came things like marbles. I hope you know what marbles are. If not please Google. We had two games. One we drew a circle about 4 feet in diameter. A marble was placed in the middle of the circle and each of us took turns trying to knock it out with our shooter marble. If you missed or weren't successful your shooter stayed in the circle. This allowed another person to knock your shooter out of the circle- and keeping it. This way you either lost all of your marbles and went home. Or you won a few and went home.

The other game of marbles involved shallow holes, (pockets) dug in the dirt 4 - 5' apart. The object being to successfully put your marble in hole #1 and proceed to #2, #3 etc until you reached the finish.Kind of like a miniature golf played with marbles. I believe you were also able to knock you competitor away from getting near a hole.

Mid May - Late May: Yo-Yo's. The Duncan yo-yo company had Philipino yo-yo demonstrators. These guys would hit all of the candy stores in town on a regular basis. They could make a yo-yo walk and talk and wiggle on it's belly like a reptile. The idea being you headed into the store and bought one. Most of us kept ours in a drawer from year to year and just pulled the old one out. They looked better because the paint had been rubbed off the edges (doing walk the doggie). Even though you had an old yo-yo you still needed new string. And the string was sold in waxed paper envelopes containing three strings. There was all kinds of tricks you learned to develop and use with the yo-yo. Hours passed with a group of guys yo-yoing. Walking the dog, around the world, rock the cradle etc, were important things we learned as we chatted and pushed and put down one another in a special way. I don't want to leave withut mentioning the Duncan "Black Diamond". This baby was all black with 6 simulated diamonds implanted horizontally on each side of the yo-yo. This was the top of the line. Very few of us had a Black Diamond. After all the cost fifty cents.

May: Mumbly Peg. You need to Google this because space does not permit me to go into this intricate past time. Somehow we all had access to a pen knife. And every conceivable stunt that could be done with a penknife was done. The object being the last person in the competition to be the winner. The first trick was easy progressing to harder and harder until one person was left. No knife fights ever broke out it was just another way we could pass a morning. Please Google this.

All through the spring until summer time were spent having a catch. Which involved two or three guys a ball and some baseball gloves. Fly balls, grounder and line drives were thrown and caught simulating and honing our skill to throw and catch a baseball. Water pistols that the teacher kept until the last day of school. Baseball Cards and flipping cards to win some more. Tossing pennies against a wall. I don't know how we had time to grow-up.

There had to be many more forms of recreation we had but these came on a cyclical basis. Just like clock work. These games were pulled out and put back on some mysterious schedule. Prepared by who, I don' know. Along with the games we also learned to get along with one another. And, without parental interference or participation. How could we learn to play and have fun without parents? The Shadow Knows.

Stay tuned for the High Dive next.

Larry P.
http://www.squidoo.com/streetgames-1940

1948 has come and gone I know that. And, maybe sometimes I think was it really like that. And just recently I got up with an old buddy (Joe Di) and yea is was like that. In between these games or pastimes were our bikes, hopping freights, rope swinging and swimming at Henry Clay. We were so free. No one even asked where we were going or where we had been. Our parents and neighborhood expected us to be kids but also behave and show respect.

Larry Pitts
Wilmington, De 1948
http://www.squidoo.com/streetgames-1940

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The Riotous Premiere of "The Rite of Spring"

 "The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." - Thomas Kelly, on the premiere of The Rite of Spring

Ninety-six years ago on May 29th 1913 at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, the most infamous opening-night scandal occurred when Les Ballets Russes staged the first performance of The Rite of Spring - a ballet with music by the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinksy. Before the evening was over, the audience - primevally provoked by the brutal, rhythmic music and primitive dance - would erupt in riot. Literally taking what Longinus had written in the first century of the common era in his treatise, On the Sublime - that art should arouse emotion, pleasingly "rape' the soul, and the reader or listener's response is necessary to 'complete' the art - the usually respectful Parisian crowd responded by whistling, booing, hissing, shouting, fist-fighting and cane-hitting one another in the aisles and perhaps even (if we are to believe some of the more theatrical accounts) barking like dogs.

The Rite of Spring was a radical, revolutionary moment in art and, as a clarion call for modern music, was as much of a precursor to rock as the blues. The simultaneously primitive and modern orchestration challenged the early twentieth century's notion of what music could be, and introduced (and in time demanded) the right to shock.

As the lights went down at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées, the audience was immediately tested by the prelude which began with an unaccompanied instrument that was unrecognisable - a bassoon played at its highest register. This gave way to a cacophony recreating the Creation, before an ominous pause followed by an incessant rhythmic chord that introduced the dancers and the plot. The dancing was as confrontational, un-Spring-like, chaotic and - at times - ugly and contorted as the music. A series of ritualistic settings depicting fertility rites in an imaginary pagan Russia further outraged an audience more accustomed to the tranquillity and conventionality ofSwan Lake.

By intermission, the police were called in to restore order amongst an audience divided as to whether they were witnessing genius or heresy. The furore worsened in the second half culminating in full-scale riot as the jerky, profane, Wicker Man-like "sacrificial dance" finale unfolded. The pandemonium was such that the orchestra couldn't hear itself play and the dancers couldn't hear the orchestra. Nijinsky stood in the wings frantically shouting instructions to the dancers. The Ballets Russes director attempted to diffuse the situation by flicking the house lights on and off (why he thought that would help I'm not sure; a heavily 'shroomed Julian and I once employed the same bizarre tactics when there was a knock at our door and we tried to pretend we weren't home). Stravinsky, who had fallen in love with his earth-shaking music of the spheres, could not understand why others were not hearing it as he heard it; distraught, he fled the theatre before the end.

The premiere night of The Rite Of Spring was a scandalous but seminal event. Stravinsky's orchestration would undergo a few revisions before finding a more welcoming audience and enduring popularity particularly after the score was prominently featured in Disney'sFantasia. The 29th May 1913 audience - which included Picasso, Proust, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Ravel and Debussy - would also incur its own 'revision' ... as time went on and The Rite of Spring altered the way we experience music and theatre, there weren't many willing to admit that they had failed to recognise the revolutionary moment as it happened. 

[http://doriancope.blogspot.com]

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The Rite of Spring in the Festival of Autumn - A Study of a Century's Lost Art

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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