Riot of spring.
Years ago, when I was in graduate school and hating it, I contrived to get my department to send me to Paris. (The reason I offered was Derrida, of course.) As I'd been warned, the native French would have nothing to do with me. But I met a Haitian who would talk to me. He worked in the Sorbonne's ancient library and lived with his tropical birds on the working-class outskirts of town. We liked to discuss what we missed from home. He missed his Vodou grandma, island music and island time; I missed English.
Fusty and musty, dopey and dumpy, tit for a tat, diddle and dawdle, bump and grind. Besides the comedy of the language, its funkiness and clatter, I loved the sudden shifts in speed and weight, and the directness. French seemed to me to thrive on the fog of equivocation. Whatever point you were waiting for someone to make was always being deferred, pushed so far back in the elaborate sentence or paragraph or several-minute-long monologue that after a while you stopped expecting it. By the time it arrived, you mistook it for another tangent. Even distinguishing one word from the next was a struggle: French seemed to allot every syllable the exact same emphasis as every other.
French modern dance has similar problems. It is too often twitchily decorative, mellifluous to the point of monotony, or both. The proclivity of French choreographers for the smooth and superfluous has not stopped them, however, from revisiting the dances and music of the Ballets Russes.
Diaghilev's early-20th-century troupe was based in Paris, but it spoke Russian with a vengeance. Diaghilev was intent on producing "the first Russian ballet, since there is no such thing." He asked of ballet, "Why take inspiration from the minuet of the French court and not from the Russian village festival?" His choreographers and composers?Fokine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, a young Balanchine, Stravinsky?created works that delved into Russia's peasant past, in stylized yet bruising terms.
Lionel Hoche's five-person Rite of Spring, presented earlier this month at Danspace Project, is the latest foray by contemporary French choreographers into the Russians' savage modernism. Hoche, who trained at the conservative Paris Opera Ballet (they've been conserving since Louis XIV), is well-aware that Stravinsky's score for the Rite functions as a dare. It tells you, Hoche said, "that it is perfectly fine on its own. It doesn't want anything. So where is the space for anything else?" Rite poses that question itself. It seems to want the answer to be: There is none.
Understandably intimidated by his undertaking, Hoche chose the piano version of the score, which reduces a thunderous dare to a whisper. Stravinsky conveys the story of Rite?a maiden is sacrificed to "the violent Russian spring," as he put it?by staging a sacrifice in the music itself. In the course of the half-hour piece, melody is overtaken and devoured by rhythm. No wonder the original audience rioted.
By the end, the wending lyricism of the bassoon that began the work has been entirely swallowed up. But to achieve this obliterating effect, you have to have a bassoon, as well as drums, big horns and propulsive violins. One instrument, even one as wide-ranging as the piano, cannot enact the sacrifice of individual melody.
The music now demands less of the choreographer, and Hoche offers less. His Rite feels optional rather than destined. The men prey on the women (practically the only thing male French dancers ever do with women), or they lie about in a display of heroin chic. Either way, nothing much is at stake. The dancing is all flickery limbs, with the torso?where Stravinsky's "upwelling nature" might naturally have welled up?left largely unperturbed.
But when the Chosen One (Celine Zordia) dances by herself, the scene radically shifts. Zordia answers the challenge that the music poses?to find room in it for other life?by riding it like a monster wave that will clobber her in the end. The unstoppable rhythms animate and ravage her. The French are habitually immune to the outside influences in their midst, even the ones they admire. But here Zordia is, with a whole mythic Russia coursing through her.