What do you call a group of more than 4 Bassoons?
Not Firewood.
A Riot.
Stravinsky only wrote for 2 bassoons, but he got a riot!
When asked about the origins of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky recalled in his book Conversations, “I had dreamed of a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.” Between Stravinsky’s surreal dream, Nijinsky’s primordial choreography, and the PR genius of Diaghilev, the impresario who pulled the fete off, they all set the stage for some WOKE madness that fateful day in 1913.
Woke it was! Shortly after the bombastic music and ritual dancing, the audience was awoken to a riot. A pagan seance, sacrifice on stage, and the tortured motions of Nijinsky’s choreography were all a little too much for the Parisian audience. If it were today at the Kennedy Center, it’s very likely Ric Grenell and his anti-woke dance director would ban the performance and label it WOKE leftist ideology. We know it as a symphonic masterpiece.
Wild stomping dance. One of the great scandals in the history of music
Imagine going into the Kennedy Center in your furs and walking out of pandemonium.
More than 100 years later, we continue to enjoy the riotous energy that Diaghilev, Nijinsky, and Stravinsky brought to the stage that day. Perhaps now, with some distance from the riot, we can sit back and say, “Wow, Stravinsky knew how to wake us up and see the world around us.” His music, a fantastical explosion of life and spirit, touches audiences’ inner core to this day. It’s as if the pagan ritual helps us find our primordial roots.
1913 was a time for experimentation in music and dance. Atonal music had ripped through Vienna, and tonal was back, but Stravinsky and Diaghilev stretched the art form beyond recognition. Stravinsky introduced new approaches to melody, harmony, dissonance, and rhythm. He explored how music could represent an abstract subject matter. People were so incensed that they started a riot. Throwing tomatoes and yelling through the performance.
Today, we almost have a riot when an audience member unceremoniously applauds between movements, or the sneer we give a neighbor when their cell phone rings at the most quiet, breath-defying moment of a piece of music.
It’s rare for us to come away from a performance at the Kennedy Center being scandalized, but on that infamous day in 1913, many Parisians left clutching their pearls.
After Kennedy Center leadership removed dance curators at the Center, they installed a new, self-described MAGA and anti-woke ballerina to the post. Who is to say that with the new censors in place at the Kennedy Center, our own current manifestation of Rite of Spring could be banned from Kennedy Center Stages?
When you start censoring artistic expression, you restrain the human voice and movement that express new ideas in music, dance, and theater. John F. Kennedy often spoke of the importance of the 1st Amendment and free speech. And here we are, with leadership at the Center named in his memory, censoring what it calls DEI and ‘Woke’ art. Censorship has no place in the halls of the Kennedy Center. Let dissonant echoes fill the halls with the resonance of protests through artistic expression.
Join us in our peaceful yet “riotous” protest against the leadership failures at the Kennedy Center. Sign our petition to let Ric Grenell know that audience members do not want censorship of art at the Kennedy Center and demand that KC leadership and board stay out of the partisan anti-woke anti-DEI culture wars.
In addition to protesting the actions this administration has taken against arts independence at the Kennedy Center let’s join our voices together to protest 1) imperialist actions in Venezuela without congressional Authority and 2) increasingly fascist takeover of our cities by out of control ICE officers who think it is Ok to murder and kidnap people in our communities. We as an arts community must stand up against all acts of this authoritarian regime. We the people united are stronger than the cowards in power!
Leave a Reply