Spoiled spring: There are no more seasons

A ‘poor’ but humorous Sacre

To celebrate the centenary of the Sacre du Printemps, we commissioned the French-Brussels artist Gaëtan Bulourde to write a new version of this impressive work. He positions Stravinsky’s ballet back in the com-poser’s era and wonders how it will resonate in the present day. ‘In the early 20th century,’ says Bulourde, ‘we see how scientific modernism and the rationalism associated with it triumph over religion in Europe. However, the progress of science fails to eliminate the cultural desire for the sacral. It is this eternal sacrali-ty that Stravinsky, Roerich and Nijinsky bring into the limelight here. Stravinsky reverts to pagan sources, not to return to a distant past since, on the contrary, his work is radical and modern, the antipode of all nostalgia. We find this freer, more primitive and sometimes also bolder expression in all areas of the arts throughout the twentieth century. From Dadaism to punk, from Lettrism to Viennese Actionism, etc.’ 

Using homemade instruments made from cardboard and other recycled materials, Bulourde presents, as well as possible, a faithful interpretation of the original score of Le Sacre du Printemps. The result is a poor but humorous version, a radical desecration of this masterpiece. His libretto is a collage of writings that comment on the original libretto and the music and on the context of the ballet’s creation in 1913. For the choreography he used folk and ethnic dances: the Dutch clog dance, the South African gumboot dance, Sevillanas and Bollywood ballets, Bulgarian harvest dances, the Mbende Jerusema from Zimbabwe, etc. It is a collage of musical material, words and dance which Bulourde says is similar to the composite material and even the cubist character of Stravinsky’s work.

• Gaëtan Bulourde is an accomplished mathematician and musician. Since 1998 he has been initiating pro-jects on the borderline between dance, theatre, sound art and performance. He has performed in the work of Meg Stuart, Xavier Le Roy, Maria-Clara Villa Lobos, Thomas Lehmen and Christian Rizzo. In Burning Ice 5 (2012) we presented his performance Robert Plant.