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| The BAM Lepercq Space done up for the 31st Next Wave, featuring the installation You Are Here by Ken Nintzel (Photos: Elena Olivo) |
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Showing posts with label A Rite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Rite. Show all posts
Friday, October 4, 2013
A Rite Opening Night Party
Thursday, October 3, 2013
In Context: A Rite
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| Photo: A Rite, by |
A Rite runs at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House from October 3—5. Context is everything, so get even closer to the incendiary action with this curated selection of articles, videos, and original blog pieces related to the show. For those of you who've already seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
The Rite, Remixed
by Brian McCormick
“I’m a post-modern constructionist. The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.” — Bill T. Jones
When Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring, he set out to shock. Written for the 1913 Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score featured provocative approaches to rhythm and tonality, with transitions that lurched wildly and aggressively between movements. The primitivism of Nijinsky’s choreography and Roerich’s scenic elements evinced the ballet’s subtitle, Pictures of Pagan Russia. The music, likewise, was heavily influenced by Russian folk songs, although Stravinsky denied it. While there may have been chaos in the audience on opening night 100 years ago, The Rite of Spring has become one of the best-known and most recorded works in the classical repertoire.
Still, to many dance-makers, the idea of doing another Rite of Spring is practically taboo. “I’m a postmodern constructionist,” choreographer Bill T. Jones said. “The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.”
“We come from the dance world,” added Janet Wong, associate artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “We don’t want to make this.”
This very reluctance opened the way for the creation of A Rite, a collaboration between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and SITI Company, under the artistic direction of Anne Bogart. They came together at the University of North Carolina through a festival organized by distinguished musicologist Severine Neff.
“I’m a post-modern constructionist. The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.” — Bill T. Jones
When Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring, he set out to shock. Written for the 1913 Paris season of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the score featured provocative approaches to rhythm and tonality, with transitions that lurched wildly and aggressively between movements. The primitivism of Nijinsky’s choreography and Roerich’s scenic elements evinced the ballet’s subtitle, Pictures of Pagan Russia. The music, likewise, was heavily influenced by Russian folk songs, although Stravinsky denied it. While there may have been chaos in the audience on opening night 100 years ago, The Rite of Spring has become one of the best-known and most recorded works in the classical repertoire.
Still, to many dance-makers, the idea of doing another Rite of Spring is practically taboo. “I’m a postmodern constructionist,” choreographer Bill T. Jones said. “The Nijinsky version would be problematic to modern people.”
“We come from the dance world,” added Janet Wong, associate artistic director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. “We don’t want to make this.”
This very reluctance opened the way for the creation of A Rite, a collaboration between Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane and SITI Company, under the artistic direction of Anne Bogart. They came together at the University of North Carolina through a festival organized by distinguished musicologist Severine Neff.
Monday, September 30, 2013
BAM Blog Questionnaire: Will Bond & Jenna Riegel, A Rite dactors
by Rhea Daniels
Will Bond is an actor and a founding member of SITI Company and Jenna Riegel is a dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. They are both featured performers in A Rite, an incisive deconstruction of the riot inducing Rite of Spring. The piece is a collaboration between the BTJ/AZDC & SITI Company conceived, directed, and choreographed by Anne Bogart, Bill T. Jones, and Janet Wong in collaboration with the performers. As a product of this collaboration both Will and Jenna may now be referred to as dactors—a term coined by the companies to refer to the all-encompassing skills of the performers.
Did you have any preconceived notions about The Rite of Spring before you entered the studio? Had you seen/heard it performed before?
Jenna: At the time we started working on this I hadn’t ever seen a version. When we started working on it, I watched a few: the Joffrey Ballet version, Pina Bausch. In our workshop that we did at the beginning of the process we watched several excerpts of different versions. I was excited from the beginning that it would be a deconstruction, and about the question of whether it was necessary to even use all parts of the score or if we could use other sound.
Will: I'd seen The Rite of Spring as dance, and I've listened to it many times. SITI actually referenced it once in our production of Who Do You Think You Are, which is a lot about the brain, theory of mind, and neuroplasticity. I had some idea of what our A Rite might be like, but it hasn't turned out anything like that idea.
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| Jenna Riegel and Will Bond in A Rite, photo by Paul B. Goode |
Will Bond is an actor and a founding member of SITI Company and Jenna Riegel is a dancer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. They are both featured performers in A Rite, an incisive deconstruction of the riot inducing Rite of Spring. The piece is a collaboration between the BTJ/AZDC & SITI Company conceived, directed, and choreographed by Anne Bogart, Bill T. Jones, and Janet Wong in collaboration with the performers. As a product of this collaboration both Will and Jenna may now be referred to as dactors—a term coined by the companies to refer to the all-encompassing skills of the performers.
Did you have any preconceived notions about The Rite of Spring before you entered the studio? Had you seen/heard it performed before?
Jenna: At the time we started working on this I hadn’t ever seen a version. When we started working on it, I watched a few: the Joffrey Ballet version, Pina Bausch. In our workshop that we did at the beginning of the process we watched several excerpts of different versions. I was excited from the beginning that it would be a deconstruction, and about the question of whether it was necessary to even use all parts of the score or if we could use other sound.
Will: I'd seen The Rite of Spring as dance, and I've listened to it many times. SITI actually referenced it once in our production of Who Do You Think You Are, which is a lot about the brain, theory of mind, and neuroplasticity. I had some idea of what our A Rite might be like, but it hasn't turned out anything like that idea.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Star-Spangled Stravinsky
By Robert Jackson Wood
Few things seem further from purple-mountain-majesty America than sacrificial virgins and pagan Russian rituals, two things evoked by Igor Stravinsky’s modernist 1913 powder keg The Rite of Spring. But as BAM raises the curtain next week on A Rite, whose brilliant makers, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart, are both decidedly American, it’s good to remember that the émigré iconoclast made his home in the US for over 30 years.
1925 marked Stravinsky’s first visit, and it was an exhilarating, neck-craning affair. “Your skyscrapers impressed me as leading to new visions in art,” he remarked. “What work! What energy there is in your immense country!” In 1939, he returned for good, settling in Boston to deliver his Harvard lectures, where he spoke famously about music as something that could reference only itself, and to conduct the Boston Symphony at the behest of his great champion Serge Koussevitzky.
On at least one of those programs, Stravinsky had included his own arrangement of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made, as he put it, out of a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” But a police misreading of a law prohibiting national-anthem tampering led to a cease-and-desist, and Stravinsky—who had become a US citizen that same year—begrudgingly withdrew it from the bill.
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| Stravinsky in his Hollywood studio |
Few things seem further from purple-mountain-majesty America than sacrificial virgins and pagan Russian rituals, two things evoked by Igor Stravinsky’s modernist 1913 powder keg The Rite of Spring. But as BAM raises the curtain next week on A Rite, whose brilliant makers, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart, are both decidedly American, it’s good to remember that the émigré iconoclast made his home in the US for over 30 years.
1925 marked Stravinsky’s first visit, and it was an exhilarating, neck-craning affair. “Your skyscrapers impressed me as leading to new visions in art,” he remarked. “What work! What energy there is in your immense country!” In 1939, he returned for good, settling in Boston to deliver his Harvard lectures, where he spoke famously about music as something that could reference only itself, and to conduct the Boston Symphony at the behest of his great champion Serge Koussevitzky.
On at least one of those programs, Stravinsky had included his own arrangement of the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” made, as he put it, out of a “desire to do my bit in these grievous times toward fostering and preserving the spirit of patriotism in this country.” But a police misreading of a law prohibiting national-anthem tampering led to a cease-and-desist, and Stravinsky—who had become a US citizen that same year—begrudgingly withdrew it from the bill.
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