Why did the Russian ballet in Paris cause a scandal & a brawl?

On the evening of May 29, 1913, the usual subdued murmur in the auditorium before the start of a performance was absent. It was more like the rumble of an approaching storm. Two weeks earlier, Sergei Diaghilev's ‘Saisons Russes’ (‘Russian Seasons’) had presented a new production by Vaslav Nijinsky – ‘Les Jeux’ (‘The Games’), set to music by Debussy at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The audience did not like the ballet: instead of graceful steps, the dancers imitated a game of tennis and then flirted with each other. Upon seeing Pierre Monteux at the conductor's podium (he had also conducted the premiere of ‘Les Jeux’) and hearing the first bars of the overture to ‘The Rite of Spring’, the audience cast aside all decorum and erupted in boos. The scandal began before the curtain had even risen.

The composer dreamed of spring

It’s believed that the concept for the ballet came to composer Igor Stravinsky in a dream: a young woman, surrounded by elders, dances to awaken spring and dies. He set about composing the music, while artist Nicholas Roerich worked on the sets and co-wrote the libretto with him. Vaslav Nijinsky created the choreography. The result was a ballet with almost no plot, centered on a pagan rite of the Earth’s rebirth after a long winter – complete with dancing, circle dances, merriment, revelry and earth worship.

It took the dancers 120 grueling rehearsals to get used to Stravinsky's dissonant, jagged-rhythm music, so unlike typical ballet melodies. The costumes Roerich designed bore no resemblance to the elegant ballet attire: voluminous shirts with solar designs created by the artist himself.

The dancers (in bast shoes, not pointe!) turned their toes inward, slouched and hunched and stomped and hopped on straight legs. The choreography – essentially the very first example of modern dance – was so physically demanding that Maria Piltz, the performer of the ‘Chosen One’, couldn't even move after the premiere. She stood motionless, tears streaming down her face.

A brawl at the theater

It wasn't a ballet. At least, not the ballet everyone was accustomed to. Not a romantic story, but a pagan ritual involving a sacrifice. A violation, as the audience perceived it at the time, of all decency and convention. The noise in the auditorium grew louder and louder; the dancers could barely hear the orchestra, but they continued with the performance. Nijinsky counted out the beats for them from the wings, while, in the audience, Claude Debussy pleaded with the hecklers to stop and got into an argument with one of them. Nicholas Roerich tried to find a rational explanation for what was happening: "Who knows, perhaps, at that very moment, people were in a state of inner exaltation and were expressing their feelings like the most primitive of tribes."

"The excitement and shouting reached a fever pitch. People were whistling, jeering at the dancers and the composer, shouting, laughing <…> I was deafened by this hellish noise and rushed backstage as quickly as I could. There, everything was going just as badly as in the auditorium. The dancers were trembling, holding back their tears. "…A month-long work of composition, endless rehearsals – and, finally, this chaos," wrote ballerina Romola Pulskaya, Nijinsky's fiancée, describing what she had witnessed.

Stravinsky was the first to lose his nerve: the composer left the auditorium and rushed to Nijinsky's aid. At that moment, the theater resembled a seedy port tavern. It was difficult to tell who were the supporters of Stravinsky and Nijinsky and who were their opponents. The audience shouted, jeered, grabbed umbrellas, canes and chairs and didn't hesitate to use them. Fighters tried to pull each other's top hats over their eyes. Shouts, hysterical laughter, flashing lights, applause, cries of "How much longer will this go on?!" – everything became a jumbled mess. Before the audience's eyes, ballet as entertainment, dance for beauty’s sake, ceased to exist and a previously unseen ballet appeared, forcing the audience to analyze what was happening on stage.

Spring is coming

The only one satisfied with how things were going was Sergei Diaghilev. "This is exactly what I wanted," he declared to the ballet's creators.

A year later, ‘The Rite of Spring’ was performed in concert – and was enthusiastically received. Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet entered the repertoire of the ‘Russian Seasons’ and became one of the most important works of the 20th century. More than 300 versions of it appeared: productions by Maurice Béjart, Mats Eck, Pina Bausch and many other choreographic stars.