Describes how Russian dancer-turned-choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky broke free from ballet conventions in his pre-war productions for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes: L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912), Jeux (1913) and, most famously, The Rite of Spring (1913). Focuses on his characteristically reductive movement vocabulary, the arrangement of dancers on stage and his retreat from the traditions of illusionistic theatre as recognized and understood at the end of the long nineteenth century. Considers various source materials, including press reports, photographs, choreographic notation (where available) and oral testimony. Also explores possible influencing factors within the pre-war theatrical scene (modernist puppet theatre, two-dimensionality, the so-called ‘cinema of attractions’), as well as influences Nijinsky may have had on the choreographers who followed him.

This chapter surveys the fields of musicology and dance studies, examining some of the most influential historically themed scholarship that has emerged within the two disciplines – and echoed across their own disciplinary histories – since the early twentieth century. Paying particular attention to the work of towering musicologist Richard Taruskin and dance expert Lynn Garafola, the chapter provides a useful account of the ballet’s scholarly legacy and the principal themes that have arisen across what has been a stupendous (and seemingly endless) volume of literature. Of these themes, race, gender and national identity prove particularly enduring, as generations of scholars seek to situate the ballet within coterminous histories of rupture and continuity.

Examines surviving drafts of The Rite of Spring’s written scenario, created jointly by Roerich and Stravinsky, to explore how the ballet embodies on stage some of the ritual festivities that take place through the spring season of the Russian rural agricultural calendar. Prominent within this context is the singing of vesnyanki, ritual ‘calls’ for spring – short, repetitive invocations sung outdoors, from an elevated position, by children and unmarried girls. Khorovod dancing and games are also shown to be important activities central to springtime ritual observances. Charting how these activities make an appearance in the ballet, this chapter also explores the nationalist agenda of the Russian Silver Age, a period of roughly three decades, from the 1890s (the Russian fin de siècle) to the late 1910s, which witnessed a tremendous explosion of creativity in literature, philosophy and the arts. Folk song anthologies from the period, including those by Mily Balakirev, Nikolai Lvov and Ivan Prach, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Anton Juszkiewicz, emerge as historical artefacts of key significance to our understanding of the inspiration behind and source material of original works such as The Rite of Spring. In conclusion, this chapter considers a little-known connecting thread between the ballet and the opera Snow Maiden by Rimsky-Korsakov, which also features prominent ritual springtime observances, including a scene of sacrifice.

Identifies and explores the surviving sources of The Rite of Spring’s original visual aspect: costumes, designs for décor, posed photographs, articles and reviews in the press (especially the full-colour supplement Comœdia illustré), and artwork by the eminent Russian painter Nicholas Roerich. Also considers the role of the Hodson/Archer reconstruction (Joffrey Ballet, broadcast in 1989) in determining the look of the ballet and how that look captivated the scholarly imagination. Provides a structured account of Roerich’s career and theatrical experience, the main stylistic characteristics of his output and, in particular, his work alongside Ballets-Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev and composer Igor Stravinsky.

Offers a succinct account of the genesis of the music composed by Igor Stravinsky for The Rite of Spring, introducing – and challenging – standard scholarly narratives about authorship, the nature of genius and the ‘work’ concept. Provides a timeline to help readers appreciate the development of the score as a collaborative project involving not only Stravinsky, but also visual artist and amateur archaeologist Nicholas Roerich, choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, impresario Sergei Diaghilev and Ballets-Russes soloist Maria Piltz (who danced the role of the Chosen One at the premiere). Considers the nature and significance of Stravinsky’s published sketches, revealing their role in the creation of the ballet and the standard critical responses to it that have dominated throughout the past century.

Summarizes the contents of the volume, focusing on cross-cutting themes: the reality of the premiere; the synthesis of the arts; avant-garde currents of the early twentieth century; Russian folklore and national identity; and the legacy and afterlife of Stravinsky’s score.

This chapter explores the 1965 Bolshoi production of The Rite of Spring, choreographed by husband-and-wife team Natalia Kasatkina and Vladimir Vasilyov and set to Stravinsky’s score. The principal aim is to explain how the production fits into the characteristic aesthetics of the Thaw, the period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the government of the USSR reformed in the wake of Stalin’s death – and when a surprising Stravinsky revival took place at the Bolshoi Theatre. During this revival, The Rite of Spring appeared not as a strictly socialist realist work, though it did preserve some markers of socialist realist ballet. Rather, it was a production characterized by an avant-garde experimentalism itself in line with an emerging twentieth-century tradition of Rite re-imaginings.

Adopting a wide-angled view of the wealth of music-theoretical literature on Stravinsky’s score for The Rite of Spring that has emerged across the past century, this chapter surveys what has been a noisy corner of music scholarship. Much of the scholarly ink devoted to the work – specifically, to its status as a self-contained, purely musical structure – explores the business of pitch: principally, whether or not Stravinsky’s music can be heard as tonal or atonal, incoherent in its pitch organization or the result of some kind of secret musical code or unifying system, there to be deduced by the all-knowing and expert music analyst. Considering Stravinsky’s own statements on the matter, alongside a succession of highly nuanced music-analytical studies (Allen Forte, Richard Taruskin, Pieter van den Toorn), this chapter provides a detailed synopsis of how and why The Rite’s music has been approached by scholars, and what the resulting literature about the work’s internal genetics can reveal about trending academic perspectives over time.

Begins by considering the visual discrepancy between the earliest photographs of the dancers from the original production of The Rite of Spring (taken by Charles Gerschel) and the sketches made by art student Valentine Gross during rehearsals and first performances: a discrepancy between a dissonant, harsh geometry and an art-nouveau-inspired, impressionistic beauty. Explores how this disjunction reflects a broader cultural anxiety of the period – as apparent in some of the first press reviews of the ballet – about dancing bodies, an aesthetics of ugliness and the grotesque. Describes how Nijinsky’s choreography and its obvious bodily deformity evoked parallels with the avant-garde practices of Futurism, Cubism and primitivism, as well as with a lineage of established ballet traditions (character dance and grotesque ballet). A final section explains how Nijinsky managed to re-frame his dancers on stage so that they could invert the power dynamics of the standard Orientalist gaze.