In his book Stravinsky Inside Out, Charles M. Joseph described the May 29, 1913 premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring, hereafter Le Sacre) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris as ‘the cataclysmic Sacre,’ ‘a genuine sea’ emanating from Paris that left the art world shaken (2001, 14). On a torrid late afternoon that same day, ‘[t]here, for the expert eye, were all the makings of a scandal’ (Ross 2007, 65). It is unclear whether the music, with its ‘savage’ rhythms and ‘primitive’ sounds, or the dance, with its jarring gestures and frenetic movements, caused the monstrous scandal (Goulding 2011 [1992], 90). The scandalous flavour of Le Sacre has immortalized this ballet as a work of high modernism. However, the collaborative team that created Le Sacre was fascinated with ancient cultures. After providing a brief synopsis that situates the ballet and summarizes its narrative arc, I analyse the premodern and ritualistic aspects of Le Sacre through the ancient concepts of pathei mathos and skandalon. My interpretations reveal how Le Sacre embodies traces of premodernity.

Synopsis

Le Sacre was a monumental collaboration between three extraordinary Russian artists: composer Igor Stravinsky, star dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and painter and archaeologist Nicholas Roerich. Another key figure involved in this production was Sergei Diaghilev, a connoisseur of modern art and the genius impresario of the Ballets Russes. The Ballets Russes was essentially a travelling ballet ensemble comprised mostly of iconic Russian emigres who performed in a number of experimental works.Footnote 1 As dance historian Lynn Garafola has shown, Diaghilev was a master at discovering new talent and bringing together the most avant-garde artists of his day (1989). Le Sacre entered the Ballets Russes repertoire for its Paris season, and the ballet later toured to London.Footnote 2

The concept for Le Sacre came from Stravinsky and Roerich. They wanted to capture an archaic, pre-Christian Slavic society and its springtime ritual of renewal. The climax of Le Sacre revolves around a young female virgin, ‘The Chosen One,’ who must dance herself to death. In this ritual context, the virgin’s sacrificial act functions to renew the earth and, therefore, perpetuates the lifeblood of the community and strengthens the ties between humanity and divinity. Over the last 110 years, Stravinsky’s score has been performed by orchestras around the world and has inspired numerous choreographers.Footnote 3 Nijinsky’s version was not performed again after the 1920s until dance notator Millicent Hodson reconstructed his choreography for the Joffrey Ballet in 1987.Footnote 4

The ballet, which lasts approximately thirty minutes, is divided into two parts, as its subtitle ‘Pictures of Pagan Russia in Two Parts’ announces. The first part, ‘L’Adoration de la terre’ (Adoration of the Earth), captures the tribal texture of the community. Part I contains seven smaller scenes: Introduction, Augurs of Spring, Ritual of Abduction, Spring Rounds, Ritual of the Rival Tribes, Procession of the Sage: The Sage, and Dance of the Earth. These scenes depict what are imagined as diverse aspects of an archaic society, including prophecy, dancing young women, and the village elders. Part II is entitled ‘Le Sacrifice’ (The Sacrifice). This section contains six smaller scenes: Introduction, Mystic Circles of the Young Girls, Glorification of the Chosen One, Evocation of the Ancestors, Ritual Action of the Ancestors, and Sacrificial Dance (Van den Toorn 1987, 26–27). These vignettes follow the mysterious game that the women must play to select the Chosen One. In another dance, the women invoke their ancestors, and the Chosen One is delivered over to wise male elders. The ballet’s final moments dramatize the sacrifice of the Chosen One. Here she exerts herself with a series of exhausting leg extensions, turns, and jumps. When the Chosen One finally collapses to the floor and expires, the elders raise her dead body heavenward, as if offering it up to the gods.

Pathei mathos (‘knowledge by ordeal’)

Le Sacre is emblazoned into the memory of dance and music history for its daring modernism. Put differently, it seemed to break many of the rules of classical music and ballet.

However, as a classicist and Byzantinist, I am also aware of the decidedly premodern elements embedded in this ballet. Despite the profuse scholarly interest aroused by Stravinsky’s score, there is in my view no inquiry into the processual path to ‘knowledge’ that his music generates. In this section, I invoke the Greek term pathei mathos (‘knowledge by ordeal’), which one first finds articulated in the ancient playwright Aeschylus (Agamemnon, l. 177). The basic idea behind pathei mathos is that suffering, violence, or a limited experience can ultimately bring about profound and revelatory learning. As this section demonstrates, the ancient trope of pathei mathos sprang unexpectedly straight into modernity as a fertile source of inspiration. Specifically, elements of ‘knowledge by ordeal’ underpin many ancient Greek dances, theatrical works, and medieval gestures.

Part I of Le Sacre is structured around particular religious aspects that set the stage for the culminating sacrificial ordeal. The ballet’s aura of rituality derives inspiration from the creators’ interest in pagan Russia and, in this way, parallels the aims of nineteenth-century Slavophilia (i.e., celebrating the Russian Empire by mining Russia’s early history). Indeed, the ‘holy’ element is also suggested in the original title of Le Sacre: Vesna svyashchennaya or ‘Holy Spring: Pictures of Pagan Russia,’ as Stravinsky considered his work ‘a kind of apotheosis of Russian rural music’ (Ross 2007, 77). Roerich, who designed the sets and costumes (and, according to some accounts, also wrote the libretto), accentuated the ballet’s religious tenor with his academic expertise on pagan Russia, ceremonial rites, and the Stone Age (Archer 2014, 26, 31–32). As Kenneth Archer writes, ‘the final scenario of Le Sacre du Printemps was based on Roerich’s original conception, which embodied his knowledge of shamanistic ritual’ (2014, 30). I would also posit that the ballet’s representation of ritual as sacre draws from the consecrated iconographic patterns of sacrificial cultic rites and choral dances of antiquity.

For example, Part I, ‘Adoration de la terre,’ consists of ritual dances that have clear links to ancient Greece. The collaborators of Le Sacre wanted to reimagine the khorovod, an ancient Slavic dance form that is similar to the Greek χορός (transliterated as chorós) and Ivanovskaja (a song during Midsummer night) (Zenck 1998, 62). In the traditional Greek dance, the maidens run clockwise in an outer ring while other women run counter-clockwise within. The Greek χορός is a complex concept, as its etymology reflects. In ancient Greek epic, χορός was described as a solar place from where the sunlight originates. In Vedic hymns, the *gher- derivative relates to the concept of sunrise, and is perhaps the etymological source of the word χορός. The verb hr ‘to place, set’ refers also to the action of bringing out the sunlight, suggesting the movements of a dance, present as well in the Greek term χορός. The Greek χορός is thus both the abode of the sun, as well as the rite of passage performed in ancient cults of fertility and regeneration of nature, imitating the cosmic movement of the planets described in Plato’s Timaeus.Footnote 5

Remarkably, this same cosmic movement, both clockwise and counter-clockwise, is present in Nijinsky’s choreography of the khorovod.Footnote 6 The circular structure of ritual dances is significant; the image of the circle expresses communality, infinitude, and rebirth—all concepts that are central to Le Sacre. Eventually, the first part of Le Sacre culminates in a frenzied ‘Danse de la terre,’ a visceral and celebratory dance of spring that prepares for the second part, the secret night games of maidens, Kamarinskaja: orgiastic trance dance), by which the virgin to be sacrificed is chosen (Zenck 1998, 62, the Synopsis of the first movement).Footnote 7 All the dancers close in around the Sage, the leader of the elders, making the centre ready for the final sacrifice: the Chosen One’s dance to the death before the Sages.

The theme of ‘knowledge by ordeal’ becomes palpable in this second part of Le Sacre, ‘Le Sacrifice.’ This part of the ballet has a darker, more violent tone than the first part. Music critic Alex Ross argues that the notion of female sacrifice was Stravinsky’s signature contribution, but this is unlikely. The old Scythian tradition (possibly a source of inspiration for Le Sacre due to Roerich’s interest in the Scythians) and ancient Greek sources testify to sacrifices of young virgins in expiatory rites.Footnote 8 The Greek imaginary is full of sacrifices of virgins who performed the role of the ritual scapegoat (pharmakos), most notably Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and the female pharmakis chosen as scapegoats in the ancient Greek festival Thargelia, where they would assume communal guilt for the benefit of the community. This practice stands out as a part of the function of mimetic rivalry also found in the Roman ordalia, from which we now have the English word ‘ordeal.’ In this sense, Le Sacre recalls obliquely the paradigmatic vision of the imaginary of the scapegoat/pharmakos.

In addition to ritual dances and female scapegoats, religiously-imbued gestures from antiquity and the Middle Ages appear in Le Sacre. The ancient Greek tragic κομμός (kommós)—a formal Dionysiac rite of fertility—κόπτω (kóptô) meaning ‘to beat or strike,’ becomes in Nijinsky’s virgin’s dance to death a ritualized gesture of ‘beating the breast’ and striking the ground. The ritual schemata belong to the typology of ecstatic and rapturous orgiastic rites in Greco-Roman antiquity (Figs. 1, 2) and gestures of lamentation in Byzantium and the medieval West. For instance, the same ritual gesture of the Chosen One can be found in early Byzantine Thrênos Theótokou (The Lamentation of the Virgin) from the kontakion (a poetic form in Byzantine hymnography that involves liturgical chant) of the poet Roman Melodos (Dobrov 1994, 397), which mirrors the common language of lamentation (kóptein, thrêneín), and thus transforms folk laments into an integral part of the Christian ritual.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Ecstatic dancing of maenad. Detail from a Paestan red-figure skyphos, c. 330-320 BC (private photo)

Full size image
Fig. 2
figure 2

The sacrificial dance of the Chosen One (Joanna Wozniak, Le Sacre du printemps, photo Herbert Migdoll)

Full size image

The breast beating of the Chosen One also recalls medieval women’s roles in the context of death and mourning. As historian Fiona Griffiths shows, medieval women (and especially monastic women) were considered especially suitable for mourning the dead with prayers, tears, and emotive gestures (Griffiths 2021, 25–26, 28, 32, 37). Likewise, theologian Cia Sautter demonstrates that medieval Jewish women engaged in their own dances of death by wailing, stamping their feet, and clapping their hands, and such gestures may have biblical roots (Sautter 2017, 93, 96–97). In Le Sacre, these gestures create a tempestuous effect, especially as they are experienced in conjunction with the syncopated rhythm that Stravinsky created for the timpani, the leading percussive instrument in the ballet’s score. In the final moment of Le Sacre, the Chosen One enacts violent and feral gestures. She beats her breast and the ground—an echo and a reverberation of the syncopated rhythm of the timpani—creating a paroxysmal experience. The repetitious, exhaustive, and painful qualities of these ritual gestures help the sacrificial virgin conjure an atmosphere of ordeal.

At the end of the sacral dance, the cumulative effect, Ross argues, is one of exhaustion, not of intensification (Ross 2007, 78). After ‘the ordeal of one hundred twenty-three jumps’ contained within the climatic solo of Nijinsky’s ‘Sacrificial Dance,’ which he created in November 1912 for his sister Bronislava Nijinska (Neff, Carr, and Horlacher 2017, 49), where the jump becomes ‘the instrument of the Chosen One’s demise,’ the dance ends abruptly, like a rift: life tears out from death. Springtime (Fig. 3). This experience (i.e., the ordeal) extends also to the audience in relation to the performers. The ‘knowledge’ obtained from this ordeal, as the phrase pathei mathos demands, seems to be that a radical death has the power to bring forth new life.

Fig. 3
figure 3

The leap of the Chosen One (Joanna Wozniak, Le Sacre du printemps, photo Herbert Migdoll)

Full size image

From their perspective as reconstructors of the stage work, Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer emphasize that each dancer who performs Le Sacre, as well as each audience member who witnesses the ballet, undergoes their own ordeal:

We have learned from spectators worldwide that they undergo an ordeal during the reconstructed Rite that carries them from the obvious struggle of the dancers’ multiple body rhythms in ‘Augurs’ all the way through to the spiritual marathon of extreme jumps and drops in the ‘Sacrificial Dance.’ Ordeal became the unifying, revelatory concept binding dance and design to the music in our work, but also, on the performance level, as the ensemble goes through ordeals first and the Chosen One emerges from them, this collective trauma or ordeal is the experience that binds the community to the soloist. (Hodson, personal communication, 2023)

As Hodson and Archer explain, the ballet, in both its music and choreography, demands the experience of an ordeal, and this ordeal bridges the gap between self and other (or, put differently, between human and divine). Along these lines, I would argue that Le Sacre takes us along a path of ‘knowledge by ordeal’ that ultimately unveils what I call ‘the crucible in art.’ By the word crucible, I refer to a severe test or trial that constitutes an extremely challenging experience. This figurative sense of crucible is based on the literal meaning of the word: a heat-resistant container used to melt metals. The notion of the crucible, like ordeal, also has a premodern valence. The crucible harkens back to practices of torture in antiquity and Middle Ages (Latin ordalium) enacted to prove the guilt or the innocence of a person (i.e., to elicit truth). Accordingly, Le Sacre relies on horrific violence to usher in rebirth and renewal. In the ballet’s finale, the virgin’s sacrificial dance emerges as a new Life out of Death.

Skandalon

In a provocative paper, ‘“They Never Dance”: The Choreography of Le Sacre du Printemps, 1913, 100 Years from the Performance,’ Hanna Järvinen points to the limits of what may be understood as ‘dance’ and ‘dancing.’ Definitions of what is or is not dance may vary at any given time, and Le Sacre challenges even the most inclusive definitions. Järvinen argues that Le Sacre is simply not dance in the classical sense (2013). Indeed, Nijinsky’s movements were jarring, frenetic, and asymmetrical, and therefore contradicted the principles of la danse d’école (the pure academic style of classical ballet technique). The usual qualities one expects in Western classical dance, ‘grace, elegance, lightness, nobility, eloquence, and expression’ do not exist in Le Sacre (Järvinen 2013, 71). Instead, a set of ‘ugly’ aesthetic qualities define Nijinsky’s choreography: compact groups, repetition of movements, turned-in legs and feet. Le Sacre’s heretical gravitation toward ‘ugliness’ is implied in the title of one of Hodson’s books: Nijinsky’s Crime Against Grace, which codifies the radicality of his creation (1996).

Given the riotous response to its premiere, it is no exaggeration to say that Le Sacre caused a scandal. However, the scandalous aspects of this ballet do not lie merely in its modernism. In its original sense, skandalon referred to a stumbling block. In a religious sense, the stumbling block may lead one into sin or cause one to veer away from their faith. The stumbling block may also act productively and generatively, as it creates the necessary conditions for a transformation to transpire. In this section, I tease out select scandalous aspects of Le Sacre. In doing so, I reveal how the complex concept of skandalon encapsulates the most salient premodern and modern aspects of the ballet.

Dance and music scholars have examined the sources responsible for the scandal that Le Sacre unleashed in 1913. In a remarkable analysis of Stravinsky’s work, dance studies scholar Gabriele Brandstetter has shown that ‘in this instant of Skandalon’ the audience rejected ‘the theatrical pact.’ In other words, the unwritten contract of scenic presentation regulated by convention was simply ‘annulled’ by the scandal of the premiere (Brandstetter 1998, 38). The violent transgression of this convention marked true chaos in the ‘machine’ of the theatre. This event marked the definitive break from the traditional modes of conception in music and the constitution of space and body in classical ballet. A new poetics of culture unfolded from this modernist rite. However, the skandalon of Le Sacre also looks backward. Steeped in ethnology and anthropology, the ballet’s preference for archaic ritual over conventional theatre ultimately valorises obstacle above aesthetics.

Like pathei mathos, the ancient concept of skandalon is ritually based. The rituality of Le Sacre marked a double breakthrough in performative representation: the transgression of theatrical conventions on the one hand, and the de-representation of the classical, graceful body on the other (Brandstetter 1998, 52). Le Sacre stages the presentation of a ritual, as its subtitle indicates. It is not a mise en scène of a sacrificial ritual, but ‘the staging of a portrayed ritual’ (1998, 38). Le Sacre reflects ‘its performability as ritual’ (Brandstetter 1998, 43). Le Sacre, therefore, reverted backward in time to challenge artistic and theatrical conventions of the present. Far from projecting atheism, the modernism of Stravinsky, Nijinsky, and Roerich unified the sacred and the profane.

In Hodson’s reconstructed choreography of Le Sacre for the Joffrey Ballet in 1987, the premodern ritualistic aspects are manifest. An especially interesting choreographic moment is the so-called limping dance in ‘The Ritual Action of the Ancestors’ scene from Part II of the ballet. In Hodson’s reconstruction, ‘limping’ helps prepare the space for the sacrificial dance, as limping-like movements are reprised with the Chosen One. Through Nijinsky’s asymmetry and syncopated juxtapositions of limbs dashing the air, the limping dance of the Chosen One (Fig. 4) does not resemble a proper dance (in a classical balletic sense).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Limping dance (Joanna Wozniak, Le Sacre du printemps, photo Herbert Migdoll)

Full size image

Both the premodern and innovative thrusts of the limping dance can be articulated through the concept of skandalon. Nijinsky’s movements appear to be a ritualized portrayal of lameness, particularly within scapegoat rituals in ancient Jewish, Greek, and Scythian cultures. Skandalon, the obstacle or ‘stumbling block’ (Greek σκάνδαλον) comes from the root σκάζω, which also signifies ‘I limp.’ Thus, skandalon is the obstacle or model of mimetic rivalry, the cause for stumbling and for limping (Girard 1987, 416). Tradition implicitly associates the stumbling block with the disabled person (e.g., the lame god Hephaestus) and the scapegoat. Limping is also expressed figuratively in the Bible: ‘How long will ye limp upon two legs?’ (I Kings 18:21). According to the theologian William Oscar Emil Oesterley, this curious dance step may have simulated lameness, which would arouse God’s pity and move him (2002 [1923], 112).Footnote 9 The limping dance of the priests of Baal might also be associated with forms of mournful supplications; in Syriac, the verb means ‘to dance’ and ‘to mourn.’

Like Le Sacre, other religious renderings of ‘limping’ directly involve springtime and sacrifice. The Hebrew word pesach is suggestive. Written and transliterated in the same way, the word has two different meanings: ‘to pass over’ and ‘to limp,’ which may include the idea of stumbling or hopping between two different opinions. ‘Passover’ is, on one hand, related to spring, during which the lamb is sacrificed and offered to God. It is thus interconnected with God’s gesture to skip over the house of the Jews when the first-born Egyptians were killed. The meaning of ‘limping’ also derives from the prohibition of sacrificing animals that are found limping. This double meaning of the Hebrew word is not exceptional in the world of symbols. What is interesting here is how the terms relate to the Paschal dance, the event which overlaps the Jewish celebration of the Passover, and by which Christians aimed to overcome the stumbling stone (σκάνδαλον) and the cause of quarrel (διαβάλλω) (Girard 1987, 431), making the shift from the state of limping to the choral dance (χορός) around the altar. In this sense, the presumed un-classical (or anti-classical) aesthetic of Stravinsky and Nijinsky is, in fact, deeply rooted in premodern and classical cultures.

The scandalous rhythms in Le Sacre may also be analyzed through the prism of skandalon. As scholars of religion have noted, repetition and invariance are key aspects of ritual (Rappaport 1999). Theorizing rhythm in ancient and medieval contexts, scholars Jean-Claude Schmitt, Barbara Kowalzig, and Vincent Barletta unveil how premodern cultures associated rhythm with God’s creation, the relationship between the individual and society, and the primordial (or even prehistoric) aspect of the human condition, respectively (Schmitt 2016; Kowalzig 2013; Barletta 2020). Repetitiveness is the distinctive quality shared by both Nijinsky’s choreography and Stravinsky’s musical score. For Le Sacre, rhythm is the sovereign principle at work, translated into beats and pulses in music, and beats and fallings in dance. From the first scene, opened by the Augurs of Spring in the guise of young boys who mark in their steps the rhythm of spring, to the last ‘chord of the Augurs,’ the performance becomes the ground of rhythmic beats, both musical and choreographic.Footnote 10 As Järvinen (86) puts it, such recurrence of the stamping motion, accompanied by parallel musical recurrences, created a strong sense of the work ‘going nowhere.’ Stravinsky’s ‘Augurs’ chord’ repeats no fewer than two hundred times in eighty seconds. The pulse that propels the chord in the dance for adolescents, ‘The Augurs of Spring,’ was ‘a quadruple shock … in the form of harmony, rhythm, image, and movement’ (Ross 2007, 65). Accents land every which way, on and off the beat: one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight (Ross 2007, 65). Here we have repetition punctuated with unexpected variance, which is part of Stravinsky’s scandal. The apparent aimlessness of Stravinsky’s rhythmic sequences constitutes another expression of the ‘lameness’ encoded into skandalon. This seemingly endless repetition with no ending or ultimate goal, I would argue, entirely serves the nature of the imaginary within which this work has been conceived. The rhythms in Le Sacre embody a holistic spectrum of premodern rituality, as they reimagine both pathei mathos and skandalon.

As the ballet concludes, the dance of the Chosen One enables the ascending itinerary of the soul to the realization of the gift—the gift of sacrifice—that is, Death. The ordeal experienced in Le Sacre is a liminal space filling the gap between Life and Death. The last breath and expiation of the Chosen One is the nexus of the performance: it grants meaning and endurance to life and the work of art. In Le Sacre, this is the true scandal, the skandalon of the scapegoat—the Chosen One, as well as a blessing: the blessing of spring.