The ballet The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, which served as the artist’s inspiration, premiered on 29th May, 1913, in Paris. The composer sought to adapt the music to the specific nature of the story through the use of striking rhythms, sharp instruments and dissonant chords. The work talks about pagan rituals in Ruthenia, associated with the cult of the Earth. It is composed of two parts: Adoration of the Earth and The Sacrifice. Stravinsky’s music draws attention to the most important themes of the performance, centred around the forces of nature and their impact on human life, in a cyclic process of death and rebirth. It also stresses the severity and cruelty of these primitive rituals.
The musical experiment was followed by Nijinsky’s choreography, full of original solutions, like the awkward movements emphasising the weight and sometimes the inertia of the body. The performance was a slap in the face of tradition, which had already predetermined its failure on the day of its premiere. Later the ballet was repeatedly staged, but with different choreography, and it was not until the 1970s that attempts were made to recreate the original version. One of them became the basis for Katarzyna Kozyra’s work.
What first strikes the eye in her Rite of Spring are the dancing elderly people, displayed almost completely naked. Their only ‘costumes’ are gender attributes specifically designed by the artist, and distributed on the principle of opposition (men have female ones, and vice versa). Their dancing silhouettes appear on seven screens forming circles, delineating the areas of life and death in accordance with Nijinsky’s choreography. The characters in the inner circle perform the dance of the Chosen One – a young girl, while the outer one shows the corps de ballet.
The strong message of the work is based on the arising dissonance. Bodily weakness is confronted with rhythmic movements requiring tremendous physical fitness. We see old, damaged and deformed bodies, performing one of the most demanding choreographies. The contrast is intensified by the montage of frames with noticeable breaks and vibrations, which stress even further the physical awkwardness and infirmity of the performers, thereby drawing the viewer’s attention to something much more important than the virtuosity and mastery of movement admired in ordinary ballet performances.
In Kozyra’s vision, dancing becomes a tool for exposing the liminal states of body and mind. This is pure expression unspoilt by convention, which artists of the early twentieth century dreamed about. At the time, representatives of various fields of art proposed to move away from overused forms and conventions deprived of any strength, and above all called for a return to sources unrecognised by the so-called high culture. Folk art, various rites and rituals, artefacts of primitive cultures, as well as the manner of children and the mentally ill constituted a reference point for artists and art theorists.
However, in her video installation Katarzyna Kozyra does not refer directly to those fascinations and inspirations. She accomplishes her goals in a thoroughly contemporary way, using new media. The effect of simplicity and original expression key to her work is achieved with the help of advanced technology.
Thanks to technology Kozyra created a dance performance which would have been impossible in reality. The movement of the figures in her videos closely resemble animated dolls or mannequins driven by unknown force. This is the mechanical dance which Heinrich von Kleist wrote enthusiastically about in his essay, describing the unusual expression of dancing puppets. At the end of his work he even put forward a controversial theory regarding their charm:
(...) because this [charm] seems to be found in its purest manifestation in human forms, which are simply devoid of consciousness, and, in equal measure, in the forms with infinite consciousness, in other words, puppets or God.
In von Kleist’s interpretation, a dead doll endowed with extraordinary charm captures the essence of dance better than a living man. It is through the inert puppet, and not the graceful movements of a dancer, that the ideal of art can be achieved.
The unnatural, almost inhuman motions of the figures pushed by invisible force in Kozyra’s installation perfectly correspond to von Kleist’s ideas about art. The effect is strengthened by the sequence of mechanical dance movements and music from The Rite of Spring, which seem to repeat indefinitely. In this way, the artist has achieved a significant shift in meaning. In Stravinsky’s work a young girl must dance herself to death to maintain the law and order of cyclical changes. In Kozyra’s installation the victim is brought back all over again, as if animated by an invisible spirit, to repeat her spasmodic dance once more, to the rhythm of the same twisted music, offering a piercing vision of human existence.
Bibliography:
• Katarzyna Kozyra, The Rite of Spring/Fruehlingsopfer, exhibition catalogue, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 2002
• Katarzyna Kozyra, Rite of Spring (Faltblatt), The Renaissance Society, Chicago 2001
• Heinrich von Kleist, The Puppet Theatre, Chimera, 1904, Volume 7, pp. 32-40
Author: Magdalena Wróblewska, November 2010, transl. Bozhana Nikolova, May 2015
Katarzyna Kozyra
The Rite of Spring
1999-2002
seven-channel video installation
Zachęta National Gallery of Art