Stravinsky Dances is monumental. At 505 pages of text and an additional ninety-nine pages for notes and appendices, it is considerably longer than current monographs edited, of necessity, to reduce publishing costs. It has the heft of a reference book and is dense with details. Having already published her highly regarded book Moving Music (Dance Books, 2000), Jordan now tackles the composer of the twentieth century, whose life and career, encompassing exile, migration, and changing aesthetics, speak to the many geo-political-cultural realities of the time. With the centenary of Stravinsky's best-known choreographic score almost upon us—Jordan calls Le Sacre both “icon” and “monster”—her book will spark fresh discussions and insights, and deserves to be read widely.
Jordan's point of departure is “Stravinsky the Global Dancer” (SGD), an online database that she created in collaboration with Larraine Nicholas, which currently provides documentation for a staggering 1,251 dances known to have used Stravinsky's music. Maintained by the University of Roehampton's Centre for Dance Research, the database, largely finished in December of 2002, currently provides information on choreographies created as late as 2008, and additions are welcomed. The database is fascinating in its own right, and it is easy to see how it influenced Jordan to explore networks of choreographies. One can search by year, choreographer, musical score, company, and country of performance. Within a couple of searches, I had identified correspondences that merited further exploration; “Ragtime for 11 Instruments,” composed in 1920, largely after ragtime's heyday, for example, returned choreographically in the U.S. in the 1980s, perhaps as part of the Scott Joplin revival. In some productions, Stravinsky's score indeed was used along with works by Joplin and Ellington.
I came to the book as a musicologist for whom Stravinsky remains a touchstone and whose works, from the lush romanticism of Firebird to the austerity of the Requiem Canticles, have charted the aesthetic currents—notably neo-classicism and serialism—of twentieth-century modernism. Based on the reactions of some of my students, the rhythms, harmonies, and instrumental timbres of Le Sacre, what we used to call its “primitivism,” still have the power to shock. I vividly recall the experience of the Joffrey Ballet's “reconstruction” of Nijinsky's choreography, and in many respects date my interest in dance research from that event, as I realized how my musicological training, beset by its own struggles to capture the experience of sound in time, had ignored the dancing body. In the presence of the choreography and the glorious Roerich sets and costumes, the score could no longer remain aloof and resistant to messy, violent, ritualized, dying bodies.
As Jordan cogently argues, “Movement changes musical perceptions” (11). Paying attention to choreography makes us hear the music differently; indeed, Le Sacre with the Joffrey sounded entirely new. Jordan's well-chosen subtitle emphasizes her focus on how specific scores changed both in Stravinsky's own life and in the years since his death, as choreographers, those who knew him personally and more who did not, continue to have something to say with his music. Through the meeting of the sensory planes of sight and sound, we look and look again and hear afresh. While her meticulous analyses provide evidence that the music changes what choreographers did with movement, more importantly, from my perspective, she suggests how choreographers may have caused Stravinsky, like the rest of us, to hear his own music differently and to rethink his compositional choices over time.
With as many stories as Jordan has to tell, structure and pacing is everything. Her six chapters move us both backwards and forwards through time, as Stravinsky is danced by various collaborators. The opening chapter, “The Composer's Perspective,” is an especially useful introduction to Stravinsky's life as one lived in and through the theater, broadly understood. Jordan distills previous Stravinsky scholarship, presents Stravinsky's own statements about dance, and charts his attendance at dance events. Jordan has also made extensive use of the voluminous material in the Stravinsky Archive in the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland. As she notes, dance for Stravinsky was the ballet. His final relocation to Hollywood took him out of the dance mainstream and limited his relationship, in particular, with the growing modern dance scene in the U.S. (An attempt by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge to bring together Stravinsky and Martha Graham was unsuccessful; Graham rightly knew Stravinsky wasn't her man, although she admired his music. One can only imagine.)
While theatrical experimentation clearly mattered to Stravinsky, given the personal and political complications of his life, his works were foremost a commercial enterprise. His regular practice of recontextualizing ballet scores as concert music was a financially lucrative decision, but one with ramifications for his choreographers. As he outlived many of his collaborators and so often had the last word (even if self-contradictory or filtered through the influential but unreliable Robert Craft), Stravinsky maintained control over his work and its reception. And his power to do so, I think, has shaped musicological historiography about virtually all musical-choreographic projects; the composer wins.
Smartly, I think, Jordan forestalls dealing with Le Sacre until she explores his entire corpus (chapter 2), focuses in on Balanchine (chapter 3) and Ashton (chapter 4), and most importantly, tackles Les Noces (chapter 5). In this way, Le Sacre both stands apart and is revisioned through the shared familial heritage of Nijinsky and Nijinska and through a host of other relationships. Smartly, too, Jordan resists the usual privileging of commissions. Thus we hear less familiar stories, a choice that foregrounds how Stravinsky's music and its influence might allow for competing theatrical approaches to the sensorial planes of the aural and the visual. Yet again, Jordan draws our attention to the reinterpretations—the intertextuality that repeated use of the same score creates over time.
Chapter 2 provides an introduction to the choreographer-centered nature of the following chapters through considering, in general, what choreographers and dancers wanted from Stravinsky's music—a music both related to and different from the nineteenth-century musique dansante. She explains, “The effect [of Stravinsky's music] is of insisting on the present moment, a holding-in of energy rather than its release with breath, until the jolt of an unexpected accent or shift into new material, and then the sense of the present re-establishes itself once more” (87). She also explores, although with less depth than I would have liked, Stravinsky's own embodied presence, his performance at the piano and movement on the podium, and his supposed fondness for acrobatics and social dance—evidence, when coming from friends and observers, that could reflect lingering perceptions of his own reception as a Russian “primitive.”
This chapter simultaneously shows the possibilities of the SGD database for understanding the larger culture of Stravinsky dances—who did what to which score and when. Jordan's discussions of settings by Marie Marchowsky and James Waring, Pina Bausch, and Mark Morris reveal the strengths of her synthetic analyses that draw on film and multimedia theory along with her musical training and command of musicology. While her critical discussions strike me as generous and sensitive, she does not shy away from pointed judgments: “I also react with impatience to the busy-ness of many recent Stravinsky choreographies, the rhythmic legacy of Balanchine–Stravinsky to both ballet and modern dance over read and gone awry, with choreographers finding so much detail in the music that they stifle it” (157).
Her evaluation of Balanchine in chapter 3 reworks, as she acknowledges, ideas from her earlier Moving Music. In keeping with her “re-visionary” stance, she deliberately stays away from the best known Balanchine works in favor of less trod terrain, the Movements for Piano and Orchestra and Le Baiser de la fée, which show the range of his response. She describes Balanchine's love of serialism, an aesthetic as much as a compositional methodology now undergoing reinterpretation, as is Balanchine himself, through Cold War studies. She provides evidence of Balanchine's adoption of serial precepts—working with “sets” of material that can be endlessly reworked through inversion and reversal, and a quotation from Suzanne Farrell suggests just that: “There were enough steps to fill a four-act Swan Lake, only they seemed to be danced backward and upside down” (205).
Jordan calls into question Balanchine's “misleading and reductive” comments about the hierarchical relationship of music over movement and composer over choreographer (255)—a power imbalance I can't help but see re-inscribed by Balanchine in his own gendered and racialized terms, as Brenda Dixon Gottschild and others have demonstrated. Balanchine, for whom Stravinsky apparently never expressed reservation, was one of the few collaborators to outlive him. Jordan argues that Balanchine found a new “creative freedom and security” after Stravinsky's death in 1971, one that produced a “radical manipulation of the composer's scores,” for example, in the “bold reworking” of music from Le Baiser de la fée in 1972 (166). As a coda to the chapter, she notes how Apollo and Agon, “marked indelibly by the hand of one choreographer” (238), have such different production histories from the multiple settings of Le Sacre and Les Noces. This observation suggests the downside of canonization: aural and visual stagnation.
As a foil to Balanchine with his prodigious response to Stravinsky, Frederick Ashton, the subject of chapter 4, only set four of Stravinsky's scores. While Jordan deems Ashton an unlikely choreographer for Stravinsky, she emphasizes that the two collaborators had more of a relationship than has previously been known. Jordan finds that Ashton's works present a compelling set of circumstances and extremes, and argues that his experience of Stravinsky's music changed his movement.
Chapter 5 was most revelatory for me, with its in-depth treatment of Les Noces, Nijinska's masterpiece, to use Jordan's term, and more recent settings by Jerome Robbins and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Like Nijinska's bridal attendants, Jordan braids musical, choreographic, and chronological strands together, taking account of continuing musicological research and our changing understandings and appreciations of Nijinska's contributions. Stravinsky's unusual score with its archaic Russian sung texts and battery of four pianos (one played by Aaron Copland at the premiere), and Nijinska's exposition of a kind of women's ensemble culture that allows feminist or proto-feminist readings, provide views of both loss (of the Russian past, Stravinsky's own theatrical conception, and of Nijinska's choreography) and the possibility of re-emergence and re-evaluation. Jordan makes a case for Nijinska's confident engagement with Stravinsky's multiple musical structures and of her direct influence on the composer. Jordan's analyses of the later settings by Robbins, whose treatment she finds unpersuasive, and by De Keersmaeker, whose choreography she likes better, allow her to explore how this work has returned, both musically as in the 1994 ethnographic recording of Dmitri Pokrovsky and his ensemble used by both Robbins and De Keersmaeker, and choreographically. Nijinska gets written back into our history, but unlike Balanchine, without the “restraining order” that foreclosed further experimentation by other choreographers (328).
In a chapter of ninety-plus pages, Le Sacre finally takes the stage in all its mythic glory. Noting that the original ballet had only eight performances, Jordan demonstrates how much of its power was again derived through loss of choreographer and choreography. I would suggest that as a pre–Great War work, it was also shaped by postwar memory and forgetting. Jordan discusses Stravinsky's willful amnesia about Nijinsky as he regained control over the musical score as a concert work and claimed authority over the original choreography; we will never know what the musically trained Nijinsky truly brought to the partnership.
Jordan takes us through Millicent Hodson's reconstruction process, identifying the limited and problematic primary sources at her disposal and one Hodson did not have, the four-hand piano score containing Stravinsky's supposed choreographic markings. As with all things Stravinsky, evidence is contradictory at best. As she did in the chapter on Les Noces, Jordan explores other treatments, notably those of Béjart and Bausch, demonstrating how music and new movement create other weddings.
It is hard to find fault with a work of this magnitude. My one reservation is with the author's overuse of rhetorical questions as a means to open up dialogue around issues of meaning. For someone as knowledgeable as Jordan, these questions seem oddly tentative or, worse, suggest that speculation about cultural contexts or meaning is at odds with careful analysis. Surely after taking us through her thoughtful discussion of Balanchine, she does not need to ask: “But is it blasphemy today to suggest that it would be interesting to see other Agons, to consider new questions asked of the Stravinsky score by choreographers, indeed to be asked to hear the music differently?” (246). Of course not; to suggest otherwise undercuts a central premise of Jordan's study, her focus on re-vision.
My quibble is stylistic. Jordan's work is impressive, and her approaches, along with the SGD database, can and should inform explorations of other composers and choreographers. A quick Google search made while writing this review located a performance of The Rite choreographed by Emily Morgan scheduled for mid-February at the University of Texas, El Paso. It is proof of the power of Jordan's study that I want to see this production in order to hear again this musical score I only think I know.
