Le Sacre du printemps

It's when, as a young fine-art student, I saw Maurice Béjart's "Ballets du XXe Siècle" dance Igor Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du printemps" (late Fifties, early Sixties, in Brussels), that I finally entered the 20th century.

That was soon followed by seeing my first ever Giacometti (in Paris), then my first de Kooning (in Amsterdam)!

I have been very fortunate, those momentous events could have missed me, I could have missed them.

Every time I hear this music, I very clearly see specific steps from Béjart's powerful choreography, the two are totally merged in my mind.

Yet, when I saw Pina Bausch's take on the Sacre, I once again was moved deeply. And it's when I saw Wim Wenders' magnificent film, "Pina," that the urge to explore that music came back with much force.
As I was already working "in/on/with time" (thanks to computers), I felt ready to "listen to Stravinsky's music with my eyes."

I thought I "knew" this music, I was wrong, very wrong!

Trying to create/find a dialog between it and "my" images, I discovered a world far more complex, rigorous, strict, and savage, than I ever imagined.

Robert Craft and the Philharmonia Orchestra are here beautifully honouring Stravinsky's music.

I've worked with lots of different musics, some at the bleeding edge of contemporary creation and yet, "Le Sacre" has made me see/hear a level of sophistication which, though so very complex, escapes mannerism completely, (re)connecting with what is so essential to me, (the experience of) pre-verbal perception (making "that visible" visible seems to me to be the highest goal of Art).

Complex architecture at the service of an emotion, of a feeling, driven, shaped and made manifest by it, so very far from the sterility of conceptually driven work.

Incidentally, 2013 is the 100th anniversary of the premiere of this music (and ballet) and it has not aged at all, it seems to me to be just as "revolutionary" today as it was then.

Here's some of what Stravinsky said about his music: "Very little immediate tradition lies behind The Rite of Spring – and no theory. I had only my ear to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed."

And Pina Bausch talked about her work with her dancers this way: "I look for something else… the possibility of making them feel what each gesture means internally. Everything must come from the heart, must be lived."

"Must come from the heart, must be lived..."

We are much more than a brain...