Clifford Bishop previews an ambitious retelling of The Rite of Spring's premiere.
There was a time when, famously, people made their own entertainment — even if the world's trendiest ballet company was trying to distract them with the world premiere of the most revolutionary piece of music ever written. The Rite of Spring was first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on May 29, 1913. The slow hand-claps began even as the orchestra was tuning up. The eerie bassoon solo that introduces Stravinsky's masterpiece was accompanied, from the audience, by a man playing a comb and paper. By the time people started blowing whistles, the impresario Sergei Diaghilev was moved to observe: "They've obviously come prepared."
The real party started, however, when the curtain opened. The dancers of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, in faux-pagan costumes by the Russian artist Nicolas Roerich that can look pottily naive even to post-hippie eyes, stood pigeon-toed, knock-kneed and cruelly twisted. Picture a casting for Andy Pandy: The Musical. Then they began to stamp. The howls of derision were so loud, the choreographer — Diaghilev's star dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky — had to stand on a chair in the wings shouting beats so that everyone could stay in time. As if all this were not exciting and modern enough, the theatre's owner, Gabriel Astruc, anticipated rave culture by switching the house lights on and off in a benighted attempt to calm everyone down.
It was, at least until Woodstock, the greatest "I was there" event in 20th-century music — Proust, Picasso, Debussy, Ravel and Cocteau would reminisce about it for the rest of their lives. With so much unintentional comedy, such a cast of characters and, incidentally, one hell of a soundtrack, the premiere of The Rite of Spring cries out to be turned into a piece of drama, despite the obvious problem of making it all coherent. And after the surprise success of 2003's Eroica — a dramatised reconstruction of the first performance of Beethoven 's Symphony No 3 — the BBC has taken up the challenge of filming what Ross MacGibbon, the channel's head of dance, acknowledges is "a much more complicated story".
The aptly named Riot at the Rite has not only to do justice to the score — rerecorded specially by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vanska — but to live up to its title while integrating a whole ballet into the action. Its director, Andy Wilson, watched everything from The Red Shoes to Moulin Rouge! for tips.
"I got a lot from Carlos Saura's films," he says. "The way the camera becomes a partner in the dance, or takes the viewpoint, and the atmosphere, of one of the characters watching." Thus, we see snatches of the ballet through the eyes of the main players: Diaghilev, seated in a box; his lover, Nijinsky, in the wings; and, in the stalls, Romola de Pulszky, the Hungarian dancer who comes between them. It's an unlikely, but accurate, romantic tangle.
Some dance historians would take issue — Nijinsky's ballet survived only a handful of performances before it was dropped from the repertoire and, apparently, lost for ever. It was not until 1987 that two Rite enthusiasts, Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, reconstructed something they estimate to be "an 85% authentic ballet", after more than a decade's research. "There are only about seven companies in the world that perform it," says MacGibbon, "and Millicent suggested the Finnish National Ballet." The Finns turned out to be cheap, Slavic-looking and accommodating. "They didn't even object when we imported Zenaida Yanowsky from the Royal Ballet to star as the ballerina Maria Piltz," says MacGibbon. "As soon as they saw her dance, they were awestruck."
The cast is impressive. Alex Jennings is a joke-shop orchid of a Diaghilev — opulent, fragile, perfumed and regularly emitting a fine spray of mischief or malice. Adam Garcia is cocooned in a budding schizophrenia as Nijinsky. Rachael Stirling trembles devotedly as Marie Rambert, trying to explain Nijinsky's ideas to the rebellious dancers. Aidan McArdle is a Napoleonic Stravinsky, and Griff Rhys Jones's Astruc is perpetually nonplussed by the self-evident fact he is colluding in his own destruction.
"None of us got paid anything," says Wilson. "But how often do you work on something that might last for ever?" You can almost hear Diaghilev's ghost talking.
