For those who are about to die…
we take the Bolt Bus
Two Chosen One(s)
perform a Rite of Spring
in the dead of winter
Anastasia Petushkova shows me the light purple haunch of her fist and says, somewhat proudly, “I was really into it last night.”
The bruise is a testament to the ferocity of her Danse Sacrale — the dance of a sacrificial maiden in her death throes.
It’s a demanding solo: nearly 125 jumps broken only by acute back bends and several falls to the floor, from which the dancer must stand and jump again, her feet turned inward, her hands gripped in the rictus of an iconic saint, her upper body twisted into a thoroughly non-classical spasm of terror.
It’s a long solo: four minutes of flight and collapse — equal and opposite reactions to the news that you’ve been picked as the girl whose death will usher in the spring.
Wouldn’t you bang your fist on the ground too?
For Petushkova, a mid-level dancer, landing the role of The Chosen One is something of a coup. But with two performances down and one more to go, her euphoria is tempered.
“Dancing to your death is really pretty deadly,” she says.
Then she bundles up into two parkas and heads out onto wind-swept Virginia Avenue for the long walk to the Kennedy Center, where Russia’s Mariinsky Ballet is performing the legendary “The Rite of Spring” in the bone-cold end of January.
“The Rite of Spring” made history at its premiere just over a century ago.
The ballet is a triple threat: the collaboration of three Russian émigrés whose collective creativity combusted in Paris at the Ballet Russes: Serge Diaghilev, the impresario; Vaslav Nijinsky, his lover and protégé; and Igor Stravinsky, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century.
In time, the ballet’s chaotically oppressive rhythms and aggressively primitive choreography would be ordained as a heralds of modernism. But in 1913 “The Rite of Spring” was the dance world’s “Ulysses,” the ballet’s “Demoiselles D’Avignon.” It confounded the chattering class of Paris and incited a riot in the theater.
The details of the legendary melee, gleaned from conflicting accounts, hearsay and hyperbolic press reports, leave a large margin of error for interpretation. A geeky inside joke in the dance world goes: “My grandfather beat up your grandfather at the Rite of Spring premiere,” but there is no universal agreement over what exactly the geezers were fighting about. Was it as simple as a disagreement in aesthetics? Or a complex mass hysteria brought on by tribal urges?
Also up for debate was the spectacle that caused the fracas. Because after just eight performances (with more sedate audiences), the Rite as conceived by the bad-boy genius, Nijinsky, disappeared.
While Igor Stravinsky’s masterful score was embraced by creatives from Walt Disney to Martha Graham, Nijinsky’s ballet descended into oblivion along with its choreographer, who succumbed to acute schizophrenia by age thirty.
As a result, the twentieth century was filled with jazz Rites, modern Rites, a Wild West Rite and a cartoon Rite featuring the demise of the dinosaurs. But the original Rite, the one in which four dozen stomping Russian pagans ushered in the modern era, had been obscured by its own infamy.
This was particularly true in Russia, where modern ballet is the stepchild of the ballet. After Nijinsky, only two other leading Russian choreographers staged “The Rite of Spring,” changing the dance entirely.
As a Soviet ballet, the Rite had no juice. It died on the vine. A spring sacrifice.
Daria Pavlenko first saw the Nijinsky Rite in 2003.
That’s when the ballet, painstakingly reconstructed from scant sources and dogged sleuthing by the American dance historian Millicent Hodson and her partner Kenneth Archer, finally came home to Russia — specifically, to the Mariinsky Ballet, Vaslav Nijinsky’s ancestral home.
“It’s not that the ballet belongs to the Mariinsky,” Pavlenko tells me. “It belongs to the world of course.” But Nijinsky, she says, no matter where he was when he created the work and no matter his lasting legacy in the history of European art, “is Russian. This is not about patriotism. It is about what is inside you.”
Pavlenko was Hodson and Archer’s first choice at the Mariinsky to dance the lead, The Chosen One. They set the role on her, impressed by the depth of her understanding of the piece. By then Hodson and Archer had taught the version to fifteen companies, beginning with the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, a production that launched them into celebrity as “dance detectives” who had unearthed a lost classic. They had coached dozens of Chosen Ones — tall ones, short ones, vulnerable ones, defiant ones. But Pavlenko was special, Hodson recalls.
“Yes, it was something about her eyes. And when I say the eyes I’m talking about the whole face, the whole being that comes out of the face.”
It’s a significant quality for Hodson to have noted and wanted. After all, one of her key findings in researching Nijinsky’s intentions for the piece was that he did not want his dancers to convey any facial emotion. The maidens in his glade are identically masked in theatrical make-up. They transcend Russian, Eastern, pagan … to become, Hodson suggests, “pan-human.” They are, like Kabuki artists, ritualistic and indistinguishable one from another and The Chosen One becomes so by accident, not by divine direction.
“She just comes out of the crowd,” agrees Hodson. “She falls, she’s pushed. She’s just one of the crowd. She’s not made to be an individual. But I know from teaching the piece, I have never seen it the same on any dancer.”
Two years ago, I sat down at my computer with a blank word document on one side of the screen and a YouTube feed open on the other.
I was starting a new novel. I knew that its heroine was a Russian dancer and that she had a pixie cut, a family secret and an axe to grind. What I didn’t know was what ballet I could wrap around her personal story. What, I needed to know, was my heroine’s signature role?
I spent far more time on YouTube that day than on that word document.
Happily, this was 2013, the centenary of the riotous “The Rite of Spring” premiere, and Rites sprung like toadstools. Among the new deconstructed Rites and the digital graphical score Rites, there were humorously dated avant-garde clips (sorry, Maurice Bejart) and spooky gothic snuff films.
And then, there it was: the Hodson/Nijinsky production of The Rite. Performed by the Joffrey in 1987. I had found my signature solo.
I gave little thought to the authenticity of my heroine’s Chosen One. I was writing a thriller, so I simply plucked her from the corps to perform her own improvised solo on stage at the Metropolitan Opera House in the middle of a hair-raising homicidal tour. (My Chosen One was a sacrificial victim on stage and off, naturally.)
I didn’t, at the time, know these things about The Chosen One: That she was created for Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava and that Nijinsky threatened to murder his brother-in-law when he learned that Bronislava was too pregnant to dance it.
Nor did I know that Nijinsky claimed to have invented a special notation system with which he had transcribed whole 40 minute ballet “so that in ten, twenty, a hundred years, they will be able to dance (it) just as they do today,” but that it had taken that long for it to happen. When it did, the first Chosen One was no Russian. She was a Puerto Rican named Beatriz Rodriguez.
In short, I still didn’t know Bronislava from Beatriz from a brontosaurus.
All that changed late last month when I learned that the Mariinsky Ballet was dumping the predictable program that it presented around the corner from me at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for an entirely different program in Washington DC — one that headlined “The Rite of Spring.”
I began hammering on doors with the force of a sentenced sacrificial victim. Four days later I was on a bus to DC. I had a date with not one, but two Chosen Ones.
Russian ballet companies retain the archaic sounding rank, coryphée, for dancers who have graduated from the corps de ballet but not been promoted as soloists.
Anastasia Petushkova has been with the Mariinsky for nine seasons and is happy among the coryphée. She says she values the range of roles and the ability to be on stage as much as possible.
“It’s interesting to be thrown about. That’s how you learn and how you develop as a dancer,” she tells me more than once. “I’m not in a hurry.”
Indeed Petushkova exudes an ease and warmth that is unusual among her colleagues. She gamely accepts a shot of wheatgrass and proclaims it “nasty.” She shrugs when I ask about tensions in the theatre and insists she has no complaints. When I mention the difficulties of counting Stravinsky’s score she waxes rhapsodic about Valery Gergiev’s control of his orchestra, which she declares “monstrous” in the best sense of the word.
When I ask her about the physical demands of The Chosen One, she brings up the bears:
“I can hear them, the guys in the pelts who circle me at the very end, you know? I’m on the second lap, and I know that I am about to fall. I can hear them — they’re like ‘go…go…’ And when I do finally fall, they lift me. Which is good, because there’s no way I could stand. They carry me all the way to the wings and then set me on my feet and direct me back to the curtain for the bows, and my head is absolutely spinning the whole time.”
For Anastasia Petushkova, the Danse Sacrale is almost a team sport.
Daria Pavlenko, Hodson’s personal pick, had to wait ten years to dance The Chosen One.
On the eve of the planned 2003 performance, she was plucked from the Rite to star in another ballet. After that, injuries and a pregnancy prevented her from dancing the Chosen One. Only in 2013, did her time come.
By then, it was almost too late. When I speak with Pavlenko she is skipping group class at the Kennedy Center. She will go later and take class alone. “Yesterday there was more talking than working,” she says.
Pavlenko is striking at thirty-six. She is also at that point where ballet, “which was once more than a career, was really part of my life,” has ceased to be so. “Sadly, I am afraid that the ballet, worldwide, is not at its best. I hope that it is cyclical and will rise again, but for me now … the quality of my performance comes exclusively from my sense of responsibility to myself and to my professionalism.”
This is not a dismissal. Certain roles, roles like The Chosen One, she says require far more than professionalism.
“The music must actually crush the audience in this ballet,” she says. “On stage, I am just like a conduit, a conductor for that energy. In any performance you have to radiate some of that energy, but in this one, you have to absolutely expend it all. If you do not transport that energy into the audience, you have given it nothing.”
Today Pavlenko is the Mariinsky’s undisputed Chosen One.
The Russian press has anointed her “a symbol of the Mariinsky’s new modernism,” thanks largely to her role in a 100-year old ballet. The stagehands in the company refer to the Rite as “Dasha’s show.”
But when she walks through the icy dusk to the Kennedy Center, regal in a fantastical, ornate, fur-trimmed coat that could have been commissioned for the Ballet Russes, she is alone. The other dancers, dressed in slim jeans and tailored Canada Goose parkas and cross-slung bags, hustle down the street in pairs. And one gets the feeling that even though, in about two hours, Pavlenko will be surrounded by these girls who, but for the grace of god could have also been pushed from the crowd to fall at the feet of the men in bear pelts and be sacrificed to the Gods, this Chosen One is all alone in her Danse Sacrale.
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Thanks to Daria Pavlenko, Anastasia Petushkova, the Mariinsky Ballet, Natasha Razina, Valentin Baranovsky, Viacheslav Khomyakov, Millicent Hodson & Kenneth Archer for making this essay possible.
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