Mapping Nijinskys Cross - Cultural Legacy: Min Tanaka s Le Sacre du Printemps (1987)

Published: Dec. 5, 2014, 4:40 p.m.

b'Igor Stravinsky\\u2019s Le Sacre du printemps is arguably the most influential score composed for dance in the last century. Premiered to an unsuspecting Parisian audience in 1913, this Modernist ballet was subtitled \\u2018Scenes of Pagan Russia,\\u2019 a moniker that evoked the rituals of pre-Christian society. Vaslav Nijinsky\\u2019s groundbreaking choreography shocked audiences with its visceral embodiment of primeval spirituality, and Sacre has subsequently been re-staged by a wide variety of classical and contemporary choreographers across the world, including Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, and Maurice B\\xe9jart. This paper focuses on a distinctly non-Western version of Stravinsky\\u2019s score, namely Min Tanaka\\u2019s Butoh choreography of 1987. Tanaka\\u2019s work, with stage settings by Richard Serra, was premiered a year after the death of his mentor Tatsumi Hijikata, one of the \\u2018founding fathers\\u2019 of the Butoh form. In this paper, I draw comparisons between Tanaka\\u2019s stark movement vocabulary and Western embodiments of Sacre, including those of Bausch and Wigman, in order to chart a cross-cultural dialogue in dance performance since the 1913 premiere. With his controversial work, Nijinsky explored new levels of primitive ritualism in performance. He induced a company of classically trained dancers to revert to a primordial form of movement, enacting their ritual through a new choreographic vocabulary derived from elements of Central Asian folk dance. Stravinsky\\u2019s score has come to be an ongoing source of inspiration for choreographers exploring non-Western ritual from 1913 to the present day, and I posit that Tanaka\\u2019s Sacre symbolises the logical conclusion of this dialogue between Eastern and Western performance. I argue that avant-garde dance performance throughout the twentieth century has been shaped by an amalgamation of cultural elements, and that, ultimately, this inter-cultural dialogue represents Nijinsky\\u2019s enduring Modernist legacy.'