dada is ...alphabet Sacre du Printemps

Paris 29 May 20:45 hr: Premiere of the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps by Ballet de Russe, on music by Igor Stravinsky, danced by Nijinski. The ballet, originally titled La Victime shows a young girl that symbolizes the rebirth of the year by dancing herself to death.
Carl van Vechten, an American art critic known in avantgardist New York circles, wrote on the premiere:

Already after the first metres a concert of whistles bursted out, followed by lots of yelling, which was annuled by the subsequent applause. We had a dispute about art (some of us thought it art, others did not)... About forty protesters were removed from the theatre, but that did not end disturbance. They had lit all the lights in the hall, but the racket coninued undiminished and I remember that mademoiselle Piltz (the chosen virgin) performed her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage that was being darkened by the fierce lighting form the hall, apperently accompanied by the disconnected raving of a crowd of angry men and women.

For Modris Eksteins the ballet is a prelude to a new era, a call for renewal of the art and purification of the world. In a way, Eksteins writes in his book Rites of Spring - The First World War and the birth of a new era, it preluded the First World War as a psychologic turning point for the avantgarde and modernism. The pressure to create had changed places with the urge to destruction. In that mix of emotions Dada emurged.

Updated 5 februari 2001; Comments to Martin Woestenburg.

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