RITUAL TERRITORY (or the phantasmal body)

Project for a documentary film by

Étienne Aussel and Valérie Gabail

Production

Valérie Gabail - Compagnie Surimpressions

www.surimpressions.com

contact@surimpressions.com

“There are always ancestral footsteps behind me, pushing me, when I am creating a new

dance, and gestures are flowing through me. Whether good or bad, they are ancestral. You get

to the point where your body is something else and it takes on a world of cultures from the

past…”

Martha Graham, Blood Memory

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen”

Robert Bresson

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ARGUMENT

I. Adoration of the earth An immense joy reigns on earth bathed in the light of Yarilo, the solar divinity. Young

people, in their midst a three hundred year old female shaman, celebrate the arrival of

spring greeting the sun by dancing and cavorting. An elderly sage blesses the verdant

springtime. In raptures they all stomp the earth.

II. Sacrifice Nightfall. At the foot of a hallowed mound, young virgins are caught up in a magical circle.

They are about to elect the one to be sacrificed in honour of the solar divinity, He who

revives the earth every springtime. Singled out among the young girls, the Chosen One

begins a sacral dance before an audience of ancestors, thus making an offering of her youth

before dying.

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THE AUTHOR’S NOTE

From this simple idea, Igor Stravinsky conceived his seminal work, The Rite of Spring, in 1913. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, it led the way to the opening of a

modern era in dance and music once the resounding scandal of its creation had blown over.

A century later, this seemingly tenuous argument almost always exhorts every choreographer and dancer who tackles this piece to express what instinctively

constitutes his own dance. The very essence of it leads the artist to raise an existential question: what is the place of the human being within the universe and within

society? Thus emerges an in-depth face-to-face which can be painful for the artist, compelling him to overcome an artistic hurdle. In this way, the Rite has become a

choreographer’s true rite de passage to test his maturity. To accomplish the Rite would be tantamount to performing First Communion.

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So we approached choreographers who, in this last decade, had created their version of the Rite. Over a period of two years, we viewed their interpretations of

the work, we met with them and invited them to participate in the following cinematic project: to backtrack the genesis of their Rite for the camera, in a

workshop made for the circumstances without any backup other than their bodies in action. The intended purpose was to retrieve the very beginnings

of their creation, to revive the sensations, intentions, discussions and preoccupations that surfaced while elaborating their version of the piece. Some

had never envisaged this return. They considered this phase of creation a thing of the past that had run its course. Others forwarded excuses of having a tight

schedule, which was often the case... Furthermore, some versions of interest to us were no longer performed in theatres. In such cases, it was not an easy task to

reassemble for the occasion artists, choreographers and dancers as an entire troupe, or even a few chosen interpreters among them.

Five of them eventually consented to embark on the film, to recreate this mythical space around them that evokes a psychoanalyst’s lair where the body takes

over, comes into itself and speaks for itself in a way that somatises the Rite. This place, where ritual and dance are caught in the Rite’s spotlight, in its rhythms

and archaic visions, would let these tangled relationships run free in a seamless space.

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STATEMENT OF INTENT

When this film project was conceived, we had just finished some months

earlier, a choreographic fiction film on Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. We

then thought, perhaps naively, that our time with the Rite was almost over after

two years of work consecrated to it.

As things go, we chanced to reconnect with the Rite during the exhibition

“Danser sa vie” (Dancing through life) at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This

time, it happened through Pina Bausch’s rendition screened as an on-going

projection as is usual in such museographic events, hidden in the corner of a

dark, overheated room. Until then we had only seen excerpts of it. Here, we

discovered the integral version for the first time.

On a stage covered with soil, Pina’s dancers seemed compelled to struggle for

their existence, wrenching their movements from the sodden earth,

accompanied by the dissonant and brutal sonorities of Stravinsky’s music. They

exerted themselves to the limit of exhaustion. Dirt clung to their skin streaming

with sweat, their faces were strained and their bodies soiled. Nothing looked

feigned. Like those possessed and bewitched by the rhythm, they gave

themselves over, seeming to elicit their life force to the point of sacrifice.

We were moved deeply, both physically and psychologically, by the radical

extremes of life and death personified with such violence in the dancers’

bodies, charged with the flux of life.

The testimony of one of the Wupperthal Ballet’s foremost interpreters, Jo Ann

Endicott, seemed to correspond to our own feelings:

“In all my life I’ll never forget the first run-through of the Rite. Up until then

Pina had rehearsed the solo of the Chosen One separately – in her office. Not

one of us had any idea on how the Chosen One would dance herself to death.

At that time it was Marlies. The choreography carried on, we were all covered

with sweat, breathless, there was a tremor all around and there we were

looking at Marlies fighting against death. I could hardly look, it was so

frightening; I thought to myself, she is really going to die. I had to go alone on

the forepart of the stage. My feet felt like lead. Eyes riveted on Marlies. Finally

she fell, she was dead. Who knows, perhaps she really was dead? I could stand

it no longer, I ran from the stage, tears streaming, it was unbearable”.

At that moment, the questions that sprang somewhat confusedly to our minds

were the following: Could dancers who had worked collectively on the Rite for

some time, who had tackled together the major issues it brings up, and who had

lived through the intensity of on-going performances, emerge from such an

experience unaffected? Was there a before- and after-Rite for the

choreographers and dancers who set out to ascend that “sacred mountain”?

Could this be a transformation process akin to a ritual perpetuated in the

traditional societies from which the work derived its original argument, the

vision of a sacred rite in pagan Russia? Are there echoes, is there a link, or

could there be troubling similarities between a true ritual and its on stage

performance?

In the midst of our emotions, there also emerged an evasive feeling that a

commonality of choreographic gestures runs through all renditions of the work,

and that one same musical sequence inspired choreographies that could almost

design a superimposed pattern even though they had been devised by artists

with completely different artistic approaches. It was as if the Rite, through its

inherent musicality and rhythm, through its original argument and the themes it

conveys, aroused a subconscious gestural memory that infused perceivably the

choreographies that we collated.

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The Rite, this replica of a ritual, stands as the monumental tree that hides an

entire forest of nested themes. As such, it provides an ideal window from which

to extend our interrogation on ritual and its performances. Although dance is

first and foremost an art destined to move the spectator through its immediacy

and its means of mobilizing the body, it also represents a privileged pathway

towards the body’s memory. It is susceptible of tapping the archaic, the

ontological and vital source that would spark in us the experience of an

ancestral ritual.

The contour and reason for the film began to take shape through the blurred

boundaries that created this paradox. It meant exploring this “ritualised

territory”, to establish a sort of cartography similar to an ethnographic record,

and somehow to put ourselves in the same position before the Rite as explorers

before strange tribes in an unexplored land.

It should begin with our meeting of the choreographers and dancers, at the

exact initial stage from where the film project took seed. These would be

contemporary choreographers who had created the Rite in the last ten years and

could re-enact the genesis of their choreography before our camera through

the sole means of body language. Then, would come the dancers envisaged as

incarnations of our intuition, standing as archaeologists of the body. We

would film them at work and observe the way they applied themselves during

the creation or re-creation of the work. We would watch the dance in progress

in much the same way an anthropologist observes a tribe he had never come

across before. We would embark on fieldwork to distinguish what proceeds

from conscious, controlled movement, and what emerges subliminally from the

ritual process. Finally, we would film the dancers struggling with the Rite as if

they were beings veiled in magic and mystery. We would attempt deciphering

their codes and gestural idiom, and then let the ritual and the primitive

imaginary be distilled to better understand the inner state of their bodies.

The mediumistic body, or memories live on

How much should be left to the imagination in order to grasp the history of the

Rite, to succumb and feel haunted by the shadowy presence of the ritual? What

is the right measure, what interaction exists between the interpreter and the

mask he wears? How does he come to terms with his own identity and with

what he must represent?

The dancers appeared to us as being on the crossroads of two worlds, as

parables from a universe shaped by chaotic forces, swept along in a continual

play of to and fro, between interpretation and incarnation. They belonged in a

nebulous zone between performance and possession that induced a sort of

“mythical fascination”. We knew that throughout our quest it was necessary to

overcome this fascination in order to define the actual nature of the ritual

experience.

These bodies, confronted with the very source of their creativity, were the

bedrock of a subconscious corporal memory that we began to sound. Could

they alone reflect the borderline between ritual and its performance? Was there

not an imaginary world deeply rooted in the collective memory, which could

alone answer all our questions on the ritual as well as on the performance for

the duration of a film?

We set out to search a corpus of images that could articulate the inner state of

their bodies and might operate as a sort of a mirror between the actual rituals

and the artistic performances. The ethno-filmmakers opened the way for us:

they had gone away, shouldering a camera, in the quest of other worlds. They

had discovered with wonderment peoples whose existence was ordered by

myths and rites, and who possessed the implacable power to readjust the chaos

around them. They had also elaborated a singular vision of ritual and Otherness

so that, in shedding light on that Other, they had contributed to creating a vision

nourished just as much on fantasy as on reality. This ambivalent and complex

imagery found a disquieting echo with the preoccupations of contemporary

dancers and choreographers.

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The visual world of Dziga Vertov, Jean Rouch, Luc de Heusch, Margaret

Mead, but also that of masters of fiction like W.F. Murnau and Walter Spies,

spurred us on to establish this parallel, both visual and philosophical. We would

explore the boundaries between ritual and performance; we would set off the

bodies of the “real” officiants against that of the dancers of the Rite, and thus

attempt to define how the latter had appropriated the following issues and

themes of rituals:

- The individual within the community, his pact with nature, hunting and the

area of predation, trance and communication with the powers beyond, sacrifice,

duality in men and women, fecundity, birth and finally death. These themes run

through each ritual and informed, to a greater or lesser degree, the

choreographies that were the focus of our film.

Sasha Waltz, Angelin Preljocaj, Jean-Claude Gallotta, Olivier Dubois, David

Wampach had all transcribed in their choreography his or her conception of the

Rite. They had thus brand-marked their own particular visions on their

interpreters’ bodies.

Finally, the Rite relentlessly explores our perception of Otherness. It constantly

scrutinises that so-called “primitive” Other, that “unrevealed negative of our

Self” (Michel Daubert), whose ornaments and rites we appropriate in order to

nurture creation and musical talent. From this univocal perception, which

prevailed when the Rite of Spring was composed in 1913, today’s

choreographers seem to have slipped subtly towards a more reciprocal and

pacified vision, freed from the dross errors of early primitivism. In liberating

themselves from the earlier, almost voyeur, vision of the primitive world and its

peculiarities, they have eliminated its more dubious aspects to reinvent their

own scenic rituals. They seem to have reinvented the very idea and definition

of the word ‘primitive’. In doing so, they discarded the idea of a remote

Otherness observed through a looking glass. Instead, they conceive it as an

archaic dimension buried in each one of us, like a vital source that the

experience of dance would reanimate.

The film will draw its resources and meaning from the intertwining of these

multiple elements: the questioning of Otherness, the dancers’ body-memory,

and the choreographers’ immense capacity to reflect on an argument as

archetypal as a ritual sacrifice, yet re-injecting it with their own artistic

cosmogony, all in reactivating the issues corresponding to their own times.

For present-day artists, the Rite offers the most radical opportunity to restore

dance to its ritual dimension, to re-explore through it the relationships between

the sacred and the profane, between the real and the spiritual, in order to turn

back to the very origins of dance movement. Although the Rite may appear to

be just a performance or a representation destined primarily to please the

senses, it nevertheless opens a wide scope to flights of fancy. The immemorial

and universal themes in rituals which run through it become vectors of

meaning, of beliefs, indeed of cures, by virtue of the choreographers’ ability to

reactivate them on stage, to evoke them vividly and incarnate them almost

palpably.

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ELEMENTS OF PRODUCTION

The mythical area

The meaning and intent of the film will emanate from an intimate arena, a

workshop space we wish to recreate for the dancers and choreographers.

Within this exclusive space, which we intentionally called the mythical area,

the dancer’s bodies will relive Stravinsky’s Rite. They will retrace its key

moments and, if they wish to, exchange words with choreographers. Our film

will be made up from this core material. Words will flow only from a body in

movement, from a living, working body that musical rhythms and the tenebrous

presence of the ritual haunt and infuse. It will be a tragic body, assaulted, often

dispossessed of itself.

A fragmented geometry

We will make our way towards ritual territory applying a combining device of

rehearsals with dancers and choreographers, extracts from rushes taken during

performances, and images from the archives of ethnocinema.

By placing side by side archival images of “actual” rituals together with our

images of rehearsals and performances, our intention here is not to illustrate or

to demonstrate what a ritual is fundamentally, or is not. The idea is not to

present these images as comparative illustrations leading to a demonstration.

On the contrary, we wish to surface disquieting relationships out of this

interweaving of unexpected clashes in order to foster questioning about these

dancing bodies. Rupture, the assembly of sound sequences and the

juxtaposition of heterogeneous rhythms determine the Rite’s structure.

Following the example of the musical composition, we believe that the

suggestive criss-crossing of images should refute all chronology, all narrative

linearity. Ritual themes will be the main thread running through a fragmented

montage, showing autonomous sequences, each one diffracting a chosen theme.

The voice-over: a concertante instrument

Within this fragmented montage, a voice-over will be the link between the film

scenes. This internal monologue, spoken by an imaginary narrator, will

evoke an ethnographic travel diary guiding us through the themes as they

develop, as if recording progress through a newly discovered land. It will

clarify the evocative suite of collages, disparate at first, in assuring the

continuity of images, in making them more meaningful, and combining them in

a single narration. Finally, it will conjure up the narrator’s philosophical and

aesthetic quest, his interrogations and discoveries.

This voice will thus resonate with the images rather than be superimposed on

them. It will operate as a concertante voice similar to a solo instrument

threading its way in between the editing intervals. It will adopt a poetic

intonation rather than an informative one so as to establish a distance from the

film material. The tone will sound remote, almost weary, in the manner of those

log books jotted down in distant lands (Leiris, Descola, Lévi-Strauss, and more

recently Miguel Gomes’ Tabu). In these works, the fascination for a fantastic

and illusionary Otherness vies with day-by-day fatigue, illness and home-

sickness. Similarly, the voice-over will be detached, scanning dreamily the

images appearing on screen, while commenting them in a deliberately

uncommitted manner.

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The image as a showcase for myths

In the course of researching locations and doing preparatory tests, it soon

became evident that the use of a digital camera, “cinema” style, would be

necessary. This device would, above all, do justice to the art of dance and

capture its movement. It would also fully exploit the image’s fictional power

owing to its technical subtleties and the chemistry it would produce on the

dancers’ bodies: a variety in the lenses’ focal length, depth of field, luminosity

in dim environments during performance video recordings, work on the film

grain, on sharpness and body textures. All these facilities will introduce an

element of fiction and myth into the film. It will give the dancer a free rein to

go beyond his or her role of interpreting, to slip into that of a tragic figure and

incarnate the issues at play in a transforming ritual and its underlying myths.

Sasha Waltz’s Chosen One is filmed in close-up, in performance condition,

naked on a black and undefined ground. She is a carefully worked on image,

her waxen flesh and body streaming with sweat intensifies her role. She thus

surpasses her dancer’s condition to become the allegory of a hounded woman,

isolated, banished from her community and compelled to die.

Similarly, the use of a wide angle combined with long takes will highlight the

complexity of the choral choreographies and the extent of the scenic areas,

while capturing the bonds forged within a human community. This device will

position men and women in the hub of their social environment; it will locate

them within the preoccupations and concerns of today’s world so that they can

better resonate with the visual world of ethno-cinema.

We believe that the ritual dimension of dance will come into its own through an

image with a strong suggestive pull, combined with a sound recording as close

as possible to the working bodies and to Stravinsky’s music.

As for the film’s sound script, it will operate in the form of a recurrent

overlapping that interlinks the images to one another. In doing so, it will

intentionally interchange the respective musical ambiences of the Rite of Spring

and that of rituals filmed by ethno-filmmakers. For example, strains of

continuous music originating from one medium or the other will run through

the same sequence where contemporary dance and filmed rituals are mixed.

This approach aims at maintaining a continuity of both sound and meaning. It is

designed to underline the ambivalence and the permeability between “true” and

“false” rituals and to create a fictional space in which the interpreters could

discard the working reality of dance, to transform into characters and allegories

endowed with an enriched symbolic and narrative dimension.

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A DEVELOPED SYNOPSIS

The following three scenes draw from various materials gathered in the past year. They derive from scouting for choreographers, from notes jotted down during key

moments of the Rite, notably at the 2013 centenary of its creation at the Theatre des Champs Elysées, from various trial shootings with dancers and choreographers,

and from photography shots taken during sessions of immersion with them. They naturally include the existing material of ethno-filmmakers that we wished to

combine with the commentary-over in the course of these three conceptualised scenes.

SCENE I

Prelude, or the Other in a looking-glass

A snow-covered forest on the far reaches of Siberia. A black and white close-

up of a face with blurred outlines, on a soundtrack of icy wind. Dziga Vertov

immortalised this man in 1926 for his film The Sixth Part of the World. He

appears hooded on screen, wearing amulets, leaping and whirling around while

silent spectators look on approvingly. A reindeer roped in and firmly held

awaits the blow of an axe that will kill him an instant later. Stunned, it collapses

in the snow. Fading to black.

“I don’t really know... I don’t know through what secret path the idea of

realising the Rite of Spring came to me. It was as if I was given permission...”

The voice of choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta resounds while superimposed

white shapes move around against a backdrop of black stage scenery. They are

dancers in white shirts, visions of Jean Vigo’s Atalante, of Eisenstein’s The

Battleship Potemkine... The choreographer is an unreserved cinema enthusiast

as is manifest in his use of a visual corpus from ancient Russia in his dance

homage to Igor Stravinsky. The effect brings the face and voice of the old

maestro closer to us:

"I like to compose music... Much more than the music itself. The activity of

composing...is everything for me. It's for this that I live, really... consciously.

Unconsciously, subconsciously, that's quite different, you know... But

consciously, I tell you immediately, I like to compose."

Stravinsky’s face dissolves. The superimposed images give way to a

contemporary stage scene, bare but for a pell-mell of over-turned, children’s

chairs. A frontal, wide-angle shot captures a row of dancers on the proscenium.

They are wearing business suits and slowly lie down on the floor in silence.

This is the inaugural scene of Jean-Claude Gallotta’s version of the Rite of

Spring. A bridge spans two worlds from Vertov’s Siberian shaman in the film’s

introduction, to the sound and visual effects of Gallotta’s choreography. It

represents both a phantasmagorical vision of primitive man and his ancestral

rites, and the summoning of this same vision on the contemporary stage some

one hundred years later.

Gallotta’s dancers get up slowly, like ghostly and drifting figures, as Vertov’s

shaman reappears. Like a leitmotiv, he reappears in slow motion and fills the

screen with his enigmatic presence.

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He is followed by a series of short sequences on rituals, filmed respectively by

Luc de Heusch, Margaret Mead and Dziga Vertov. They are idealised images

of rituals in their diversity and evocative power, but also figures of an

insurmountable Otherness, which is scrutinised, spied on, and reveal

themselves as an eternal source of fascination and interrogation for

contemporary artists. A first occurrence of the voice-over that will punctuate

the film appears on this enumerative sequence. It could enunciate the

following:

This is the story of a vision, that of a vague silhouette with an

indistinguishable face. An unrevealed negative of ourselves that opens the doors wide onto an infinite and troubled world, the ritual performance.

Instead of the dog-headed humans, monopods and Cyclops that the ancients had predicted, another image emerged. It was not one of a human, but that of a fragment of the primitive globe, preserved to this day and still

mysteriously palpitating under our eyes. The curtain rises over the stage of the Theatre des Champs Elysées on May

2013; it is the Rite of Spring centenary. We are attending the dress rehearsal of

a reconstruction by contemporary choreographer, Millicent Hodcent, of

Nijinsky’s 1913 creation. Ancient Russia has the place of honour here, in much

the same way the trio of artists responsible for the original creation (Stravinsky,

Nijinsky, Roerich) had fantasized and transcribed it. Hence, circles of men and

women capering frenetically in their richly coloured costumes occupy the stage.

A witchlike woman shaman, gesticulating her incantations, stands on the

forestage while a hoary old sage with a long white beard limps from the wings.

Finally, male hunters clad in moose or bearskins complete this paraphernalia of

rituals and tradition peppered to European taste. Vertov’s shaman echoes

strangely with this early 21st century primitivistic imagery: it shows

surprisingly similar costumes, frenetic capering, blank faces, and a ritual that

ends up devouring its subjects. From one vision to another...

The rehearsal stops. Mariinsky’s dancers, costumed and heavily made-up, talk

among themselves, rehearse their steps, warm their bodies up, and readjust their

dress in the hubbub of the orchestra tuning their instruments.

Scenographer Kenneth Archer slowly paces up and down the stage like an

explorer or a missionary in a faraway land. He inspects his troupe, dropping

compliments or giving out instructions. He scrutinises one last time the stage

set and the strange creatures that populate it. Then starts the machinery of the

ritual in motion, heralding the centenary of the work, in front of a battalion of

television cameras distributed around the room for the occasion. Leaving the

Rite’s officiants to their final adjustments, the camera focuses on another kind

of spectacle and modern ritual. It turns to the concert hall converted for the time

being into a swarming hive of activity composed of cameramen on the lookout,

journalists, critics with notebooks in hand, and other people, most likely

patrons and theatrical staff adjusting the finishing touches before the

performance. In their midst, the orchestra practises under the direction of

conductor Valery Gergiev while choreographers hastily answer the inevitable

interviews before disappearing in the wings to urge on their troupes...

The rite, an infinite performance, but we have lost its keys and its codes. We are forever doomed to question its vivid and ever-changing appearance.

A mirror where we lose ourselves in a vain search of our own reflections. We naively believed that we only introduced to our land its exotic and

multi-coloured appearance and the measured perfection of its dances. A century later here it is, more alive than ever, lying in wait within the

intervals of our mass media coverage. In time we will see that we had quite simply reinvented it.

The red curtain falls back. There is silence all around the concert hall. The

trenchant, sinuous sound of the oboe, the Rite’s introduction, announces the

slow arrival of spring with its perpetual circle of officiants and the Chosen

One’s reckless flight to her death.

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SCENE 2

Jean-Claude Gallotta, or the abysmal necropolis

The National Choreographic Centre of Grenoble. A large rehearsal studio

where vast plate glass windows overlook the city. Jean-Claude Gallotta’s

troupe of dancers are preparing for their performance of the Rite of Spring in a

few days time. During two full days they go over the entire choreography,

repeating each step, each figure conscientiously, finding their bearings after an

interruption of several months. The choreographer scrutinises each movement,

readjusts grouping and re-positions bodies. The ritual, which will grip each and

every dancer during the coming performances, may drive them to exhaustion

and to surpassing themselves, induced by the relentless mechanism of the Rite.

For the time being, the dancers rehearse in a studious atmosphere of

camaraderie without affectation or nerves. Their attitude looks measured and

somehow disembodied as if to create an inner calm enabling the music and the

ritual gestures to pervade and completely inhabit their bodies.

The choreographer: “step to your left Matthieu. That’s it... Shall we go on

from there? Now run through everything precisely so you may find your

positions again. There, everyone’s found their partner... And the spacing too.

Careful when you have your back turned not to clout others with your clogs!

Now for the circle...And! One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, clack!

Alright everybody? OK, let’s continue.”

The twenty or so dancers go off stage leaving a couple of performers, a man

and a woman, to work in silence of the now deserted rehearsal studio. Behind

the plate glass windows the city’s pulse beats faraway, while the two dancers

begin to enact a strange ceremony.

She is on the ground, inert, while he approaches slowly, spreads his arm above

her abdomen and begins to sketch figures in the air. His gestures are both

precise and mysterious. In turn he seems to write over her, smelling, severing,

then attempting to reanimate her, caressing himself at times like a faun before

an inanimate nymph, turning around her in an attitude of heartfelt concern

mixed with vexation confronted with this lifeless body that he tries vainly to

deliver from the realm of the dead through the power of his gesticulations and

incantations.

Although this is just a rehearsal, the dancer, absorbed in his role, momentarily

ceases being an interpreter. A continual and perfectly balanced oscillation

arises from the role he embodies, the human element of the situation he

reactivates, and the demanding physical control he sets himself. He yields to

the dark forces of the ritual now underway, mixing autosuggestion and

immersion in the role, physical tension through the dance movements, thus

letting the emotions arise before this inert body suspended between life and

death. A delicate mechanism intimately binds and transfigures these two

bodies, deeply affected by the danced ritual.

As if coming to themselves, the two dancers repeat the same score, but this

time putting it into words, describing certain gestures and directions that serve

to guide their interpretation:

The dancer: “I take her hand, she lets me, I stroke myself... I write over her, I

sever her, I sniff her... Then, a very sensual rapport takes place. And then, we

wrench ourselves from the ground, and it is as if something else happens... she

is already... she is already awake. And look, it’s like an initiation. I initiate her

back to life. Or to rebirth...”

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Fade out while strains of the Rite’s music comes through. The

studio area has been replaced by a theatre stage a few days later. It

is the same duo, the same dancers, but this time it’s a performance.

They are bare and tensed bodies; their deathly pale skin tones are

intensified by a cold, contrasted light, filmed by a wide angle

camera that transforms the stage into an endless space. The

“corpse” of the nymph lying on the ground seems to create a link

between the earth and the afterlife while the faun sketches

drawings in the air as part of his strange, mechanistic ritual.

Ritual actions do not tell stories. Their impenetrable beauties direct our gaze towards the immutable precision of each

gesture, and confronted with them, we find ourselves on the lookout for the slightest faux pas. What we ask about a ritual is whether what is done, is done the way it should be, or not.

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Scenes from Jean Rouch’s film, Le cimetière dans la falaise (The

Cemetery on the Cliff), replaces the choreography just when the faun

ends his mysterious service and brings the nymph back to life by pulling

her slowly from the ground. All the while, the long chords of the Rite

continue their insistent rise and fall. This time a corpse, bound in coarse

fabric and tied with ropes, is slowly lifted in mid-air and hauled along an

ochre coloured cliff. It is the lifeless body of a man who had probably

died a few days earlier. He is on his last journey to the after-life, taken

towards an invisible, secret necropolis placed much higher up the stony

cliff. Each member of the community has been allotted a position and a

specific task. Nothing is haphazard. Everything must be organised and

run smoothly for the deceased’s ultimate ascension like the faun whose

every gesture, as mysterious and esoteric they may be, are perfectly

executed to bring about the rebirth of the nymph.

Cemeteries are stage scenes comparable to theatre sets. Inert bodies still seem inhabited although life has left them permanently. They

remind us that they are only substance. Yet they imprint on our minds, like something that is somewhat exceptional.

A slow panoramic shot rises up the cliff to reach the necropolis where the

deceased will rest. The camera covers the ground strewn with bones and

skulls while the musical motif of the Rite gives way to a heady, frail Dogon

chant. The Niger River winds its way far below. A valley is in sight and we

distinguish a waterfall so vast that its surging flow becomes a hazy cloud.

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SCENE 3

Sasha Waltz, or the commonality of gestures

Note: This scene presents an essentially visual and evocative sequence,

composed of alternating cuts. It is based on the disconcerting commonalities of

body movements observed between documented or staged ceremonial dances

(respectively from Margaret Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali and Walter

Spies’s fiction film, Island of Demons) and a number of contemporary

choreographies marking this film’s raison d’être (here, Sasha Waltz’s version).

The voice-over will adopt a relatively withdrawn and elliptical tone. The

primary purpose is to arouse impressions, resonances, and an association of

ideas in the spectators setting their eyes on the screen.

1937, Bali. The Dagger Dance. Seven men, who have been put into a trance by

an avenging sorceress, run close together towards the camera to the sound of an

orchestra of gamelans and percussion instruments. They are bare-chested above

their loincloths and armed with long daggers. Invariably, they fall flat on the

ground, face first, then heave themselves up to continue their reckless race,

brandishing their weapons over-head.

The image of the primitive merges with that of inheritance, like a glowing ember, it only needs a little wind to see it flame up again.

2013, Sasha Waltz’s troupe. Performance of the Rite of Spring. The sound of

the gamelan orchestra will be the running motif throughout this sequence. Male

dancers, close together, progress in a warlike manner, their faces devoid of

expression. They leap, then raise their arms above their heads as if they too are

armed with daggers.

Bali. The group of women is well separated from the men’s like a mirrored

image. These women too are warlike, armed with daggers held high, they

march forward ruthlessly, devoid of emotion, jet-black hair falling over their

simple dresses.

As an echo, Sasha Waltz’s group of women: they are remorseless Amazons,

their army facing that of the men, with arms triumphantly stretched in front as

if they were stabbing at their hearts.

Then the trance begins... The Balinese men and women turn their daggers

against themselves, driven by the curse of a humiliated witch. The women are

filmed in slow motion, their blades pointed towards their hearts, lurching as

they fling their long hair back again and again, letting it fall over their bare

shoulders. Like a faithful duplicate, the Amazons of the Rite superimpose their

bodies against these dances, tossing their loosened hair over their shoulders like

streaming banners.

The strange similarities between these two worlds could go on forever.

However, this dramatic introduction is followed by an evening gathering of

men grouped in a circle around a flaming torch at a Kecak ceremony, the dance

of monkeys. The scene is taken from The Island of Demons, a work of fiction

by Walter Spies, which is another vision of Bali and its magic spells.

Like all rekindled embers, a fire hazard lurks nearby. While the men seated in a circle chant to the rhythms of the Kecak dance, the

superimposed shots evoke the dreams and changing state of consciousness of a

bewitched old man, seen against a backdrop of flames: a witch comes forth in a

bulky costume, gesticulating wildly like a creature from a carnival, fighting

against the spirit of a very old woman.

After the carnival, comes the time to sweep up the ashes.

We return to the dancers of the Rite while the fire burns slowly and carries

away the vision of the old sage. In the wings, an alarm sounds indicating that

the performance is about to begin.

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The sole decor for Sasha Waltz’s production is a little mound of grey, ash

coloured stones on the ground. It is a fragment of the primitive globe, placed in

the centre of the stage, which the dancers will presently worship, then scatter,

as the performance unfolds. For the time being, in the half-light of the

backstage, behind the still drawn curtain, a studio hand calmly sweeps the

stones of this precarious little pile. He is setting the final preparations for the

theatrical ritual, while the dancers make their way, inexorably, towards the Rite.

They embrace each other feverishly, adjust their tunics at the last minute, while

keeping feet and legs warmed.

It is the troupe’s custom that they all form a wide and silent circle, headed by

the choreographer. Their shoulders together and heads bowed, eyes closed to

receive the last instructions: the ritual can begin.

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ETIENNE AUSSEL Film-maker / Director of photography / Film editor

A documentary Film-maker and a Video-designer, Etienne Aussel started his professional career in 1999 thanks to contemporary dance at the National

Dancing Center of Créteil and Val-de-Marne (Centre Chorégraphique National de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne).His activity encompasses realisation and

edition of documentary films. He also works on image creations for stage, dance and opera. Moreover, video setting up, digital art, archive and video footage

are part of his abilities amongst others.In 2009, after having spent ten years working with José Montalvo and Dominique Hervieu (including the management

of the filming crew of the Opéra de Lyon for the Porgy and Bess opera performance), Etienne Aussel decided to leave and meet other artistic universes and to

develop his own author projects.He met lots of professionals and started to work in close working relationships with artists such as Rosalind Crisp, Nasser-

Martin Gousset, Hafiz Dhaou and Claire Jenny.He improved upon digital and audio tools that are used for shows. Then he attended the Atelier Varan’s

courses (the school which was founded by Jean Rouch) specialised in documentary cinema.

FILMOGRAPHY

Tower of Babelle (Tour de Babelle), 57’, 2004 : broadcasted on Mezzo musical channel, Lagardère group, La Générale de production.

Choreographic postcards (Cartes postales chorégraphiques) for Dominique Hervieu’s Francofffonies, 12 short films broadcasted on TV5, danced duos.

Rosalind Crisp, Space in-between spaces (L’espace entre les espaces), 2009, film directed for the Ateliers Varan.

Mowa and Around Tassiga, (Mowa et Autour de Tassiga), 52’: 2010, l’Harmattan DVD Editions.

Regards (23'), L'Ermitage Jean Reboul production – Conseil général de l'Isère, Festival Handica- Apicil 2013.

MULTI CAMERA LIVE EVENTS SHOOTINGS FOR CONTEMPORARY CHOREGRAPHERS

Rosalind Crisp, Claire Jenny,Nasser Martin-Gousset, Alban Richard, Meredith Monk, Hafiz Dhaou.

EDITING

Gao Xingjian’s Requiem for beauty, (Le Deuil de la Beauté de Gao Xingjian), fiction, 2013.

Portrait of an African Democracy, (Portrait d'une démocratie africaine), 2012 and The Muslim Catholic Priest (L'Aumônier musulman), 2010, Laurent

Savariaud, documentary films.

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VALÉRIE GABAIL Film-maker / Producer

Valérie Gabail started her career as a professional classical musician and since 1995 she has been performing as a soloist. She is recognized and specialized in

baroque music amongst other disciplines. Moreover, Valérie has been passionate very early about stage direction and cinema since she became artistic co-

worker in 2008 for the Montalvo-Hervieu dance company. In 2011, she shot her first film, a dancing fiction about The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. Then,

in 2012, she took a film directing course at the Ateliers Varan and created a short-film, Table Rase, focusing on addiction and abstinence into the

Aubervilliers’ therapy community. Documentary film became that central in her work she went into partnership with two other authors and film-makers and

founded the Compagnie Surimpressions. To complete her knowledge in this field, she attended courses about documentary production at Lussas Festival

School. She is now shooting and producing a documentary film about The Rite of Spring and the concepts of ritual and primitivism in contemporary dance.

FILMOGRAPHY

2011: The Rite of Spring, dancing fiction (33’)

2012 :Table Rase, documentary (22')

THE COMPAGNIE SURIMPRESSIONS Film production society

Founded in 2013 by Valérie Gabail, Etienne Aussel and Guillaume Delacroix, three authors and filmmakers partners from the Ateliers Varan, the Compagnie

Surimpressions is a documentary film production company. The Compagnie Surimpressions’ objectives are to give the opportunity to meaningful and

ambitious projects to exist and to be a place where ideas can convey around shared aspirations. The company was created from an independent and passionate

film-lovers’ idea. It tends to put down roots into formal and mature commitments so as to sollicitate spectator’s mind thanks to the form and the contents of

films. The two new documentary film projects of the Compagnie Surimpressions focus on The Rite of Spring and the concepts of ritual and primitivism in

contemporary dance, which is supported by the Igor Stravinsky Foundation whilst the second film project deals with the Sikh community in Italy.

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