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Stravinsky and Nijinsky
The most infamous riot in the history of the performing arts began with the violins in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” But more remarkable than the fistfight was the way the piece revolutionized classical music and ballet.
On the night of May 29, 1913, an elegant Parisian crowd assembled for the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s eagerly anticipated new ballet, “The Rite of Spring.” The opening seemed promising, but then the violins kicked in with a pulsing chord so dissonant that it made spectators wince. As the orchestra continued, the audience hissed and booed. They rose to their feet and shouted—some defending the music, but most denouncing it. People began whacking each other with canes, umbrellas, and, before long, bare fists. Stravinsky’s musical revolution had arrived.
Prelude to “The Rite”
By one account, the idea for “The Rite of Spring” came to Stravinsky in a dream. He envisioned a pagan rebirth ritual, with people throwing themselves before vengeful gods. Rather than a cheerful celebration of springtime, it was a dark and superstitious rite. To compose music appropriate for such a vision, Stravinsky tossed aside convention and broke new ground in rhythm and harmony. He constructed atonal chords never heard before and developed a meter so complex that he struggled to accurately record it on paper. At times in the piece, parts of the orchestra actually seem to be playing against each other.
Stravinsky first performed “The Rite of Spring” for ballet director Sergei Diaghilev and orchestra conductor Pierre Monteux. Both men were shocked and overwhelmed. Later, Monteux wrote that he didn’t understand one note of it and wanted to flee the room. Nevertheless, plans for the ballet got under way. Diaghilev entrusted the choreography to dance phenom Vaslav Nijinsky, whose steps proved just as inspired as the music.
Concept, costumes, and set designs by Nicholas Roerich.
The first signs of trouble came during rehearsals. The ballerinas complained that Nijinsky’s flat-footed, straight-knee jumps jarred them to their bones, and the musicians struggled to keep up with Stravinsky’s galloping pace. At one point, after practicing a particularly dissonant section, the orchestra couldn’t help but burst into nervous laughter.
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Police were called to the home of producer and TV host Don Cornelius early this morning after gunshots were heard. Cornelius was found unconscious and was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Cornelius was best known for his television show Soul Train, which aired from 1970 to 2006. Cornelius hosted the show from its beginning until 1993.
“Soul Train” was one of the longest-running syndicated shows in television history and played a critical role in spreading the music of black America to the world, offering wide exposure to musicians such as James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Michael Jackson in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I am shocked and deeply saddened at the sudden passing of my friend, colleague and business partner Don Cornelius,” said Quincy Jones, according to the Associated Press. “Don was a visionary pioneer and a giant in our business. Before MTV there was ‘Soul Train.’ That will be the great legacy of Don Cornelius. His contributions to television, music and our culture as a whole will never be matched. My heart goes out to Don’s family and loved ones.”
Mr. Cornelius, a former disc jockey, created the show in 1970 in Chicago on WCIU-TV and served as its writer, producer and host. Quickly becoming a success, the show was broadcast nationally in 1971, beginning its 35-year run. Besides the performers, the program showcased young dancers who would strut their stuff, laying the groundwork for countless dance programs , including current hits like Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance?” and MTV’s “America’s Best Dance Crew.” “We had a show that kids gravitated to,” Mr. Cornelius said.
Cornelius’ death is being investigated as a possible suicide. He was 75. Link
(Image credit: MadVision Entertainment)
This video was produced by the comedy duo Rhett & Link, but there are two professional dancers inside the costume. Keep your eye out for the special guest cameo. -via Laughing Squid
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.
Dance marathons started out as innocent fun but wound up as grim as the Depression that ended them.
Post-World War I America was in a mood to break all records: popular events included endurance kissing and hand-holding contests, eating marathons, and flagpole sitting. A guy named Shipwreck Kelly became national celebrity after sitting atop a flagpole for 7 days, 13 hours, and 13 minutes. When someone challenged Bill Williams to push a peanut up Pike’s Peak with his nose, he agreed. It took him 30 days, and he won $500 (415 euros) for the feat. It all had to do with the mood of the day. But nothing caught the public’s fancy as much as dance marathons.
A CRAZE IS BORN
The birth of U.S. dance marathons can be traced to early 1923 when, inspired by a record set in Britain a few weeks earlier, Miss Alma Cummings took to the floor of the first American dance marathon, which was held in New York City’s somewhat seedy Audobon Ballroom. Cummings wore out six males partners over the next 27 hours and won a world record. Within a week, a French college student broke that record. A few days later, Cummings retook the title, which was soon broken again, this time by a Cleveland, Ohio, salesgirl. The challenge was on.
A few weeks after Cummings’ win, a Texas dance hall owner got the brilliant idea of charging spectators admission (25¢ during the day, $1 at night). He gave his first winner -Miss Magdalene Williams- a prize of $50 (42 euros). On April 16, Cleveland’s Madeline Gottschick beat William’s record with a time of 66 hours. Within days, that record was broken three times. On June 10, Bernie Brand danced for 217 hours (more than 9 days) and went home with $5,000 (4,151 euros) in prizes.
In just a few months in 1923, the dance marathon had swept the nation and the world. And so it continued throughout the 1920s.
THE DOWNBEAT
The deaths of a few supposedly healthy young people -including 27-year-old Homer Morehouse from heart failure after 87 hours of dancing- brought some unwelcome attention. Officials banded together with church groups (who saw the marathons as immoral) and movie theater owners (who saw the marathons as competition) to try to stomp out the fad. Critics called the contestants “dangerous, useless, and disgraceful,” and they even likened them to the dancing manias of 14th-century Europe.
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Following in the Broadway tradition using the most unlikely subjects for musicals, Ana Serrano, Romeo Candido, and Carmen De Jesus are turning the story of the dancing inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines into a web-only musical production. It will debut on the prisondancer YouTube channel in 12 episodes beginning in March. -via Buzzfeed
There are no new dances, just new music. The original soundtrack for this video is here. Meanwhile, while I was trying to turn off the annotations, I accidentally hit the “snowflake” button on this video. Try it yourself and see what happens! -via Jason Kottke
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
You put your right foot in,
You put your right foot out,
You put your right foot in,
And you shake it all about
You do the hokey Pokey
And you turn it all around
That’s what it’s all about!You put your left foot in,
You put your left foot out,
Etc. etc. etc.
For some reason, “The Hokey Pokey” always brings people up; it makes people happier. Why is the Hokey Pokey so popular and beloved? Well, you can come up with your own theory, but no other song seems to symbolize a good time for people and bring a smile to their faces to quite the same extent.
In 1942, Irish songwriter and publisher Jimmy Kennedy, best known for “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic,” created a dance and an instruction song to go with it called “The Hokey Cokey.” Written to entertain Canadian troops stationed in London, this song is similar to, but not the same as “The Hokey Pokey” we all know.
Composer Al Tabor was also entertaining Canadian troops in wartime London, and in 1942, he wrote a participation dance called “The Hokey Pokey.” He claimed the name came from the London ice cream vendors of his youth, called “Hokey Pokey Men.” The accompanying dance was very similar to Kennedy’s.
In 1946, totally unaware of the British “Hokey Pokey” and “Hokey Cokey,” two Scranton, Pennsylvania musicians, Robert Degan and Joe Brier, recorded “The Hokey Pokey Dance” to entertain summer vacationers at Poconos Mountain resorts. The song was a regional favorite at dances and resorts for the rest of the forties, but that still isn’t the song we know today.
As if to confuse matters even more, British bandleader Gerry Hoey also claimed authorship in 1940 of a similar tune “The Hoey Oka.”
The general belief is that Charles Mack, Taft Baker, and Larry Laprise wrote the American version of the song, “The Hokey Pokey,” in 1949 to entertain skiers at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho. The song was a hit at resorts, so Laprise recorded it. It flopped, but Degan and Brier found out about it and sued Laprise for ripping off their “Hokey Pokey Dance.” Despite the fact that his version came out after theirs, Laprise won the rights to anything to do with “The Hokey Pokey.”
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Holiday travelers passing through Denver International Airport last week were treated to a selection of Swing classics by about 100 dancers from the non-profit organization Community-Minded Dance. The performance had been coordinated by the airport’s Art and Culture Program.
The Dutch National Ballet rehearses for a performance at TEDxAmsterdam 2011, an independently organized TED event, November 25th in the Netherlands. Narrated by Rutger Hauer. -via Everlasting Blort
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The dance of death (usually represented by a skeleton) has been a recurring theme in art and literature for centuries -at least! BibliOddysey has a sampling of such illustrations from the Heinrich Hein University of Düsseldorf collection, ranging from 1736 to the 20th century. Link
Seeing a ballerina en pointe is impressive, but not as impressive as it was 200 years ago. Competition among dancers means that everyone trains for dancing on the toes, and the quality of the shoes means that all dancers en pointe look the same. Whitney Laemmli of the University of Pennsylvania says the standardization of slippers was a deliberate method of standardizing ballerinas.
George Balanchine, the charismatic director who ran the New York City Ballet and its School of American Ballet, rethought pointe shoes. He worked with Salvatore Capezio to develop and patent pointe shoes to produced the exact lines of the foot and leg he thought beautiful, and to be quieter and less clunky than earlier pointe shoes. He required all dancers (not just the principals) to go on pointe — and not for a few short moments, but for hours at a time.
Laemmli argues that the new shoes forced dancers’ bodies to move in new ways. Dancers on this pointe regimen developed characteristically long, lean leg muscles. Balanchine also encouraged dancers to let the shoes remake their bodies, including developing bunions that gave the foot just the right line. And as their bodies were remade, dancers became “like IBM machines,” modern and indistinguishable.
Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user kirikiri)
For the third year, the Dance Your PhD competition has gathered videos of graduate students interpreting their doctoral dissertations in dance form. All 53 entries for 2011 are posted at ScienceNOW. The video shown here, by Anderson Mills, is called “Human-Based Percussion and Self-Similarity Detection in Electroacoustic Music.” The dissertation is about teaching a computer (representated here by a “robot”) to recognize rhythm in human music. Link -via Boing Boing
If you can dance while wearing a marching band uniform with a drum strapped to your belly, then the world is pretty much your oyster. In this video, the Ohio University Marching 110 perform “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO. -via The Daily What
Watch scientists, researchers, and assorted geeks get down! McGill University in Montreal gathered scientists, students, and volunteers to make this dance and lipdub video. Their sponsor, Medicom, is making a donation to the Goodman Cancer Research Centre for each view the video gets. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Honestly, bodies aren’t supposed to work like that, much less look graceful doing it. This footage was taken at the Braun Battle of the Year USA qualifier in Los Angeles on August 20th. The winning crew was Battle Born, who advances to the ultimate tournament November 19th in Montpellier, France. Link -via I Am Bored
This video is a fast-moving historical fashion show with dancing! The Viral Factory produced it for the grand opening of Westfield Stratford City on September 13th, which I believe is a shopping center, although it’s kind of hard to tell from the website. Music by Tristin Norwell. Link -Thanks, Vincenzo!
Caffeine does strange things to people, and apparently to birds! This cockatiel is so excited about a cup of coffee that he dances to the tune of a stirring spoon. -via Arbroath
Redditor webby_mc_webberson took his son and his dog to a beach in Wicklow, Ireland and snapped this picture. He said the dog “loves to express her emotions in the form of dance. Today she was feeling vertical.” Link
This girl is nine years old, and she has some great moves! Watch her show off her shuffling skills at NeatoBambino. Link
Shena took Cyriak’s animation Cows & Cows & Cows and turned it into an interpretive dance. Now if Cyriak were to take the dancers out of this video and manipulate them into his vision of dance, that would be …just like Cyriak. -via The Daily What
Whee! Four skydivers do a choreographed dance in the Skydive Arena wind tunnel in Prague, Czech Republic. The music is “Fot i Hose” by Casiokids. -via Metafilter
Of course, you’ve wanted your own dancing Pixar lamp ever since you first saw it, right? Jonathan Foote created a chorus line of lamps, seen here performing at Maker Faire. Get the details on how he did it at his blog, waxing prolix. Link -via Laughing Squid
Comments Off Apparently, high school in the 70s was more far-out than I thought. According to the YouTube poster, this was from a 70s-era science class video; the lecture at the beginning was removed to highlight the wicked groovy dance-athon. I can’t say I learned anything from this, but everyone really seems to be enjoying their time in Biology II.
Thanks for sharing, Adam Lukey!
Ah, the Father/Daughter Wedding Dance … the loving glance of a parent and child, the awkward swaying to cheesy music …
Well, not at Brooke Lavin’s wedding! At her wedding, her pop Bill showed some of his smooth moves: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via The Frisky
I’m not normally one for choreographed dance routines, however if you check out Razy Gogonea’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent, I think you will agree this one is pretty sweet. Skip to about 1:30 in the video to see his recreations of iconic scenes from The Matrix that put Keanu Reeves slow motion bullet dodging moves to shame. Link
An android, meaning the Android phone mascot, dances up a storm in Taiwan. Impressive, for a guy in an inflatable costume! -via I Am Bored
Take an Xbox Kinect to a convention and look what you get! This unnamed fan at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention gives his all to the game Dance Central. Link -via Buzzfeed
The BBC has a TV program called Fast and Loose. It’s a game show with a segment called Interpretive Dance, featuring David Armand, whom you might remember as the guy behind the hilarious interpretation of “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. Now he has a regular job doing what he does so well. -via Arbroath
Lord of the Potty Dance! This Czech troupe is talented. There was no need at all to inset a Riverdance video. -via the Presurfer
Comments Off While some complain about the snow, this little guy dances for joy! Or maybe he just really likes the song “Auld Lang Syne.” It’s a Happy Feet New Year! -Thanks, özi!
