SACRE # 197

La Sacre du printemps, Vaslav Nijinsky’s third piece, after Afternoon of a Faun (1912) and Jeux (1913), is a ballet which was first performed on the 19th of May 1913 at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.

This piece’s anchoring point is in the Nijinksy and Stravinsky’s famous Sacre du printemps’ (1913) danse sacrale. We still have fourteen of Valentine Gross-Hugo’s drawings left, testifying to the fact that in this final dance of the Sacre, the “Chosen One” sacrifices herself for her community, by dancing until she eventually dies. Six dancers, Cyril Accorsi (later Johann Nolhès), Francois Chaignaud, Emmanuelle Huynh (later Marie Orts), Latifa Laâbissi (later Marcela Santander-Corvalàn), Sylvain Prunenec, and Julie Salgues, are all aligned with one or more of these drawings. They undo the lifeless fragments to invent a danse of sacrifice. This one dance is best understood alongside the others that Dominique Brun has composed. The dancers are, one by one, “élu-sacrifié” [“elected-sacrificed”] or one of the members of this primitive community, this “other” who enacts the sacrifice.

That which Dominique Brun seeks to study and illuminate, by virtue of the movement that is Scare #197, can be summed up like this: that which brings us back to Nijinksy’s Sacre is perhaps expressed, from Debussy to Stravinsky, from Greek vases to Gross-Hugo’s drawings, not forgetting Rembrandt and Manet, from his annotated Faun to the 1919 Notebooks… This choreographic work served to support the composer Juan Pablo’s Carreño musical creation. For him, it was a question of clarifying the instrumental register of the orchestral score of Stravinsky’s Sacre, of exploring them in order to come up with a vocal score, sung by Marine Beelen, with electrical music in the background. We are also able to hear a few quotations from Stravinsky’s Noces, as well as Des pas sur la neige and fragments from Debussy’s Prelude a l’Apres-midi d’un faune.