RE-RITE OF SPRING

IOWA CITY — In a rehearsal studio on the University of Iowa campus, a handful of dance journalists have been invited by the Joffrey Ballet to witness an historic event: Vaslav Nijinky’s legendary, long-lost choreography for “Le Sacre du Printemps” danced by a professional company for the first time in 74 years.

Only a few sequences of this 34-minute neoprimitive nature-ritual have been learned by the company thus far, but they are enough to confirm the ballet’s reputation as a watershed work in modern art.

In the past, excerpts from the Nijinsky “Sacre” have been reconstructed by former members of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and small drafts for the current production have been mounted for student workshops in Europe since the early ‘80s. However, not until now has the complete work gone into rehearsal--with the premiere scheduled for Sept. 30 in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

In the words of Millicent Hodson, the sleek American academic who spent the last 16 years piecing the ballet together from sketches, photographs, reminiscences, reviews and other surviving evidence, “this isn’t just three weeks at a conservatory. This is it !”

Hodson is also restaging the choreography, and as she coaches Joffrey dancers Beatriz Rodriguez and Carole Valleskey (alternates in the role of the Old Woman) in the opening scene, the shock and outrage that greeted the ballet at its Paris premiere in 1913 becomes no mere historical anecdote. Even today there are balletomanes who would rip up the seats if Baryshnikov ventured something this daringly anticlassical.

Like Igor Stravinsky’s seminal score, Nijinsky’s movement style broke all the rules. Where ballet technique exalts an unbroken flow of movement and an unbroken line projecting out from the body, Nijinsky emphasized stabbing rhythmic attacks and angular turned-in positions.

Instead of embodying the balletic ideal of transcending gravity, the “Sacre” dancers percussively drove their weight into the floor, and their jumps-in-place (with feet drawn up) represented spasmodic outbursts rather than soaring trajectories.

Hodson is intent on preserving all these notorious crimes against grace and believes that “the root of Nijinsky’s method is in posture. You start with the posture of a single body and you find what gestures are implied by that posture, what follows from the turning in of that body, what happens to the hands.”

“You go from the posture of a single body to a small group and there you have the beginning of a new kind of ensemble. Then, if you go to a very large group--and also if you observe, as Nijinsky did, the idea of ground patterns--you’re dealing with almost a symphonic use of line and volume.”

As Valleskey and Rodriguez shuffle along in serpentine paths, occasionally making rigid “come along” gestures, drawing circles in the floor with a stick or suddenly jumping, Hodson stops the sequence to make adjustments in their distribution of weight and the position of their limbs. In particular, she wants their shoulders pitched on a diagonal before the dancers drop to the floor and asks them to radically sickle their feet: an unnatural act in the world of ballet.

Later in the day, onstage at Hancher Auditorium nearby, the Old Woman’s character solo is shown with its intended corps complement and counterpoint: the rhythmic hopping, turning and stamping--often with the dancers’ arms punching upwards in another rhythm--of many small groups executing many different unisons.

In a run-through of the scene to orchestral tape, the stage throbs with energy, but it is not the fierce, muscular thrust of tribal dancing. No, here the intricately coordinated, interlocking motifs form something like a great chugging engine, relentless and inhuman.

When he saw the ballet in his teens, French composer Francis Poulenc thought the choreography more revolutionary than the music, and the sequence at Hancher suggests no less. “Sacre” may depict an ancient culture, but its staccato pulse and engineered systems of motion prefigure the factories, highways, airports of the mid-20th Century.

The ballet requires 46 dancers (in 79 roles) but divides them into units of no more than seven. And just as the choreography deploys these cadres for maximum contrast, the costumes by Russian painter Nicholas Roerich set colors and patterns boldly against one another.

Kenneth Archer, the urbane British art historian responsible for reconstructing Roerich’s scenic and costume designs for the Joffrey staging, speaks of the kaleidoscopic effect of the ensembles in the original production and quotes contemporary descriptions of the ballet as “a violent feast for the eyes, savage, primitive and raw.”

To Robert Joffrey, “Le Sacre du Printemps” is, first of all, “a gamble,” the kind of gamble he’s taken before when reviving Leonide Massine’s “Parade” and Kurt Jooss’ “The Green Table,” despite the odds.

“We still don’t have all the money (an estimated $200,000 to $300,000), but we’re doing it,” he says on the phone from New York. “It’s been hard to get money for ‘Sacre.’ So many people don’t know about it and its importance. Sometimes it’s discouraging, but it’s important that we challenge ourselves, that we tackle this for the company, for Nijinsky, before it goes away.”

It bothers him that the budget squeeze mandates the use of a reduced arrangement of the score (“If someone would only give me a grant”). He regrets, too, that asthma attacks have prevented him from supervising the Iowa rehearsals. (“I’ve been resting on doctor’s orders.”)

His interest in restaging the ballet goes back further than even Hodson’s. In 1955, for example, he stayed in London with Marie Rambert, Nijinsky’s rehearsal assistant on “Sacre” and the matriarch of British ballet. He recalls Rambert explaining “how complicated the ballet was and how brilliant. People never gave Nijinsky credit for how well organized it was. Madame said Nijinsky wanted to set every detail--the hands, the face, the whole body. He knew every step of the ballet and, on opening night, he even put all the makeup on the dancers.” Rambert’s notated score and recollections of “Sacre” have become primary sources for the reconstruction team.

Like Hodson and Archer, Joffrey sees the new production as a means of repudiating the popular image of Nijinsky as an unsophisticated, crudely instinctive choreographer. Indeed, he marvels that a dancer who became a living legend in his early 20s for his unprecedented technical brilliance and extraordinary elevation would jettison the academic ballet vocabulary in favor of “vibrating and pulsating movement that was completely different from anything people were doing at the time.”

Or since, in big classical companies. Rodriguez finds that when dancing “Sacre,” she is calling upon her modern dance experience as much as her ballet background: “You have to retrain your body a new way (from ballet),” she explains. “It’s a totally different look. I think of it along the lines of modern style, but I can always use the technique of ballet in terms of the stamina level.”

Even the specific parts of the body that hurt after a long day of rehearsal are not the same as for classical roles, she says, and it is easy to believe all the stories about the proud Diaghilev dancers rebelling against the bent knees, lolling heads, hunched shoulders, clenched fists and infernal rhythms that Nijinsky demanded in his 120 rehearsals for the original 1913 production.

Subtitled “Pictures From Pagan Russia in Two Parts,” “Le Sacre du Printemps” was described by the pioneering British ballet writer and publisher Cyril W. Beaumont as “a story of herd reaction under the tribal rites of prayer and sacrifice in worship of the earth and the sun.”

French critic Jacques Riviere related the subject to Stravinsky’s desire to portray the surge of spring, but warned that “Here is nothing but the harsh struggle of growth . . . the fearful regrouping of the cells. Spring seen from the inside, with its violence, its spasms and its fissions. We seem to be watching a drama through a microscope.”

The opening performance at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees caused the greatest furor in dance history. Writer and artist Jean Cocteau thought the storm of protest inevitable: “All the elements of a scandal were present. The smart audience in tails and tulle, diamonds and ospreys, was interspersed with the suits and bandeaux of the aesthetic crowd. The latter would applaud novelty simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes. . . . Innumerable shades of snobbery, supersnobbery and inverted snobbery were represented.”

All hell broke loose soon after the curtain rose: shouting, whistling, laughter, boos and catcalls. When the women dancers took a pose with their hands against their cheeks, someone screamed “Is there a dentist in the house?” and others answered “Shut up!”

To artist Valentine Gross (whose sketches and pastels of the ballet provided another major resource for the Hodson/Archer reconstruction), “the theater seemed to be shaken by an earthquake. It seemed to shudder.” There were fistfights and duels fought over the ballet. A countess, with her tiara askew, stood up and announced “I am 60 years old and this is the first time anyone has dared to make a fool of me!”

A lady slapped the face of a man who was hissing in an adjoining box, somebody called composer Maurice Ravel “a dirty Jew,” Nijinsky’s mother fainted, and only the final sequence (where a woman is sacrificed to the forces of nature by dancing herself to death) managed to silence the angry mob.

The reviews proved no less extreme. Many critics renamed the ballet “Le Massacre du Printemps,” some focusing their attacks on the choreography, others on the music. “The composer has written a score that we shall not be ready for until 1940,” sneered Louis Laloy in La Revue francaise de la musique --an accurate prediction as it turned out, since 1940 was the year in which the most popular and enduring version of “The Rite of Spring” appeared: Walt Disney’s dinosaur ballet in “Fantasia.”

Since then, of course, the score has attracted many leading choreographers in ballet and modern dance, including Mary Wigman, Maurice Bejart, Kenneth MacMillan, Glen Tetley, John Neumeier, Hans van Manen, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Pina Bausch.

Stravinsky himself reversed his opinion of the original choreography more than once during his long career, but, in 1967, four years before his death, he told Bolshoi Ballet artistic director Yuri Grigorovich that “of all the interpretations I’ve seen, I consider Nijinsky’s production to be the finest embodiment of ‘Le Sacre.’ ”

Ultimately, though, questions of controversy or even quality had less influence on the fate of Nijinsky’s ballet than fiscal and sexual politics. It seems that major support for the Ballets Russes was contingent on Diaghilev re-hiring choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who considered Nijinsky’s prominence intolerable. And, finally, Nijinsky married a young corps dancer on the South American tour that followed the company’s 1913 European season, sending his longtime mentor, sponsor, defender and lover Diaghilev into paroxysms of grief and rage.

Nijinsky was abruptly dismissed and his new ballet abandoned. He attempted to form his own company, but fell victim to bad luck of every possible sort: financial ruin, years of forced internment in Hungary during World War I, growing mental instability and eventual incarceration in a number of mental hospitals. He died in London in 1950.

Nijinsky intended to notate “Sacre” but his movement-score has never been found. (Hodson says she has a dream in which the Joffrey Ballet is dancing her reconstruction and “someone comes up and hands me this score that we’ve all been looking for.”) Without it, the new production lacks a single definitive source such as the one that led to the celebrated Ballet West exhumation of August Bournonville’s “Abdallah” two years ago in Salt Lake City.

Instead, the realization of “Sacre” has largely depended upon the systematic accretion of fragmentary supporting evidence and the detailed checking of one fact (or artifact) against another.

This torturous process is virtually unprecedented in professional dance. But, just as archeologists can often re-create a whole fresco from only a few patches of painted plaster, Hodson and Archer have developed a scientific methodology that they say will yield an accurate reconstruction of the ballet’s original movement and production design despite all the gaps and errors in the existing documentation.

“I know a lot about Roerich,” says Archer, who is in the process of completing a critical biography of the man. “I know the way he thought. I understand his composition, his shading. I have his palette, which was contemporary not only for his (stage) designs but also his easel paintings of the period. In addition, I have all these Slavonic paintings that he did, later versions of the ballet by him (in 1930 and 1944), and his designs for other Slavic ballets and opera.”

“Moreover, there are the verbal clues--in his writings, other people’s letters and memoirs, and particularly the visual evidence from the critics at that time.”

Surviving photos, sketches, newspaper cartoons, pastels and actual costumes have been reproduced in nine production dossiers and color-checked (where appropriate) against a chart with 200 hues. “In my profession as a gemologist,” Archer says, “I’m used to identifying things from the tiniest scraps of evidence, looking into a gemstone and not only finding out what species it is but where in the world it comes from.”

In the same way, Hodson has meticulously collated material about the choreography in her 12 reconstruction journals. The first stage of research, she says, was simply “preserving what existed,” rather than planning any theatrical realization. Only later, with the encouragement of Massine (who rechoreographed “Sacre” for Diaghilev in 1920), Rambert, Joffrey and others did she widen her horizons.

“I’m a historian,” she declares, “and I thought it was my task to accept everything that survived literally and let it stand for as long as possible. The hardest thing for me in the project was to eliminate possibilities, because I considered every scrap of information I found so valuable that I didn’t want to let go of anything.”

She acknowledges possessing “evidence that can be used in different ways,” admits that she’s frequently needed to choose between conflicting (and often equally authentic) descriptions of certain moments, and reveals that she’s even had to fill in undocumented passages with new choreography--”making a link,” in her words, “between the last known movement and the next known movement.”

But she insists that she is not staging her version or re - creation of the ballet (“that would have taken so much less time”).

“I think ultimately there is always this argument in any kind of anthropology,” she says, “and the question of interpretation is at the root of it. There are many nuances that belong to the performing arts that are never documented, even in something as finite as a notated score. There’s so much interpretation even if you’re a rehearsal director working with a choreographer who’s sitting beside you.”

“This (production) is a historical documentation. There is interpretation, but I have evidence of some sort for everything I’ve used. Some of it is, you might say, ironclad: Stravinsky’s notes (on the choreography) in his score. That’s very inadequate by itself, but it’s what I began with and it gets much richer when you add all the sound data that’s in Rambert’s score.”

“It is not my version because I think there is material that is inescapable in it, a logic, a way of putting things together. There’s a certain principle that holds and, because of that, I don’t believe that something all that different would be arrived at by someone else.”

The project has already changed Hodson’s life. She met Archer in 1981 after she wrote him a long letter with a list of questions about the ballet. A year later they were married. Their prospects after Sept. 30 include publishing all their documentation and then--well, who knows? It depends. “There will be another project,” Hodson says, “but right now all I can think about is the next 10 measures.”

Asked if they’ve considered reconstructing Nijinsky’s last ballet, “Till Eulenspiegel” (1916), a lost work less celebrated and documented than “Sacre,” Hodson and Archer share a big laugh and exchange a quick look.

“That’s a good question,” they answer almost simultaneously.