Avant-garde in Brooklyn

This is the bicentennial year of both Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner; orchestras and opera companies have been rolling out their music all year. Today though I’m thinking of the centennial of another classical icon; Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debuted at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris a hundred years ago, on 29 May 1913.

As you probably know, the premiere provoked a near-riot. The audience was not prepared for the double whammy of avant-garde dance coupled to music unlike anything they had heard before. This was no Swan Lake.

I was in Brooklyn last night, thinking of that premiere. I don’t think there was a riot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but I can’t swear to that, for I left after forty minutes of avant-garde NONSENSE!

When Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena begins, the stage is nearly in total darkness. There’s a man making lots of strange noises; that much I could tell. Then he runs in a circle for a few moments; he might be naked; I’m not sure, it was too dark to tell. He leaves the stage.  Next perhaps twenty company members walk on stage; they move back and forth, left and right. Nothing they did would I call “dance.” Some sang polyphonic medieval music known as ars subtilior. The music at least was intriguing.

But still, the stage was in almost total darkness. Was that a man or a woman who just threw himself/herself on the floor? No idea. 

About thirty minutes in – at least fifteen minutes into my own “should I go or should I stay” debate – a woman not far from me shouted “Turn up the lights; we can’t see anything. This is unfair!” There were murmurs of what I took as agreement, though there were also hissings of “Quiet!” An usher approached her to tell her to stop.

Moments later the lights did come up a bit. I don’t think this had anything to do with her outcry, for the program notes told us that this piece was originally staged outside, using only natural light and began at 4:30 in the morning, in darkness. Since it lasts almost two hours, with no intermission, it would end well lit.

Clearly this was going to happen at BAM last night; before the performance started I had seen banks of stage lights awaiting their cue.

As I said though, I left. I realized that what I had been able to see made me want to see LESS, not more. I was on the 9:08 train home. I read Wild Tales, Graham Nash’s autobiography -- with plenty of light.