Copy Rites

This chapter considers two contemporary versions of The Rite of Spring: Xavier Le Roy’s Le Sacre du Printemps and Jérôme Bel’s self-titled production. Because there is relatively extensive documentation of Nijinsky’s original choreography for the Rite, so-called reconstructions are widely known and available. But Le Roy and Bel seek to reimagine the ballet completely. Le Roy loosely “conducts” the score as it is piped out of speakers placed among the audience, thus inverting the traditional spatial and artistic dimensions of theatrical space. Bel drastically denudes his Rite, with naked dancers, a nearly bare stage, and a flimsy monophonic rendition of the gargantuan score. He embarks on a subcutaneous exploration of a dance performance to discover its most basic constituent parts. In reworking the ballet’s “original” materials, these artists expose some basic assumptions about music and dance as media, both as performance acts and as objects of study.

An Enhanced Otherworldliness: Thierry De Mey's Screendance Based on William Forsythe's One Flat Thing, reproduced

This article analyses Thierry De Mey's screendance One Flat Thing, reproduced based on William Forsythe's dance of the same name. The filmmaker creates a heightened atmosphere of otherworldliness by drawing on the choreographer's own conception of it: from romantic ballet and the technique of disfocus. In addition to filming Forsythe's main dance, the screendance includes five movement sequences that do not appear in the original choreography. Their interspersion into the filming of the main dance contributes strikingly to the alien landscape: (1) the architectural composition of the tables, (2) the dancers’ exaggerated, disjointed movements, (3) the filmic editing through juxtaposing cuts, and (4) the close-ups for intimacy and deterritorialization. By more prominently integrating Forsythe's deconstructive aesthetic, De Mey creates an enhanced otherworld through the medium of screendance that is not possible to achieve with live dance.

THE METAPHORICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF AZTEC HISTORY

The article discusses the 1473 civil war between the two polities that formed the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, as presented in the Codex Durán. I argue that the literal, European-style rendition of the events of the war includes remnants of the pre-Conquest symbolic thought behind those events' original choreography. The remnants indicate that the war was staged to follow the outlines of the story of the battle between the god Huitzilopochtli (“Hummingbird, Left”) and his sister Coyolxauhqui (“Bells, Painted”) at the mountain site of Coatepetl (“Serpent Mountain”), an allegory for the rise and fall of powerful rulers. I also suggest that the enemy king and his second in command, after being thrown from the Tlatelolco Templo Mayor, were buried in the funerary vessels beside the Great Coyolxauhqui Stone discovered in 1978 at the base of the Tenochtitlan Templo Mayor, proved by the war to be the “true” and only Coatepetl.