On the day of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's famous ballet The Rite of Spring, a huge scandal erupted. The ballet began with a long, nasal bassoon sound, followed by a "spring divination" accompanied by furious syncopations: tumult and uproar. According to witnesses, "the agitation and shouting in the hall reached a climax: people were whistling, insulting the performers and the composer, shouting and laughing."
Stravinsky himself recalled that when he played The Rite for the first time to Sergei Diaghilev, the latter asked him a question that he found very "offensive": "And is this going to last much longer?" To which Stravinsky replied: "Until the end, my dear." This untimely ballet, ahead of its time, a work full of dissonance and pulsating rhythm, laid bare the discomfort of man in his relationships with others: "'That's not it'" is the very cry by which the jouissance obtained is distinguished from the jouissance expected."1
Vaslav Nijinsky, in the words of Proust: "a butterfly lost in the crowd," invented a new language of dance as a counterpoint to Stravinsky's complex score. Act,2 but not glossolalia. For Nijinsky's revolution in dance was nevertheless part of the experimentations of his time – those of Isadora Duncan or indeed Dalcroze's eurythmic school.
This language was destined to mark a new era, one in which the Name-of-the-Father underwent a collapse. And it is remarkable that the choreographic material and stage design elements of the show were lost for a long time.
Negligence? Perhaps this truth about the dissonance between speaking beings and sex was too radical. It was much simpler to reuse a fantasy of harmony, as Disney did when he used Stravinsky's music in his film Fantasia, a film about the birth of life on earth…
However, The Rite of Spring remains a strange and broken masterpiece about sexual awakening, underscoring that "the sexual drive behaves in general in a self-willed and inflexible fashion."3 The music and dance of this ballet never cease to be written: they change form, interrupt themselves, recompose themselves, lose themselves again, constantly finding new variations of a striking birth.
[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar, Book XX, Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., p. 111.
[2] Naveau, L., "Des mercredis soir à Paris sur le Séminaire Encore," UFORCA, 27 December 2010, available online: Lacan-universite.fr.
[3] Cf. Freud, S. (1908), "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1906–1908): London: Hogarth Press, 1959, p. 171.
