The artist was inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring,
the 1913 staging of which, to choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, caused
one of the greater scandals in music history, and by Milicent Hodson’s
1987 reconstruction of the original choreography. Stravinsky’s ballet
was based on an ancient Slavic myth of the dance of the Chosen One,
who has to ‘dance herself to death’ in order to wake up nature and
summon spring. Kozyra decided to precisely reconstruct the dance using
stop-frame animation. Nijinsky’s choreography was difficult even for
experienced dancers, yet the artist hired elderly people, whose bodies
(with the men wearing fake vaginas and the women fake penises) were,
according to her conception, to become like puppets, the whole thing
creating the impression of bodily movement suspended in a vacuum.
The dancers’ poses and gestures were carefully prearranged (in prostrate
position) and precisely recreated, with stop-frame animation providing
an effect of motion. The process took over two years to complete and
the result is a work 14 minutes long, and looped so that the cycle of the
Chosen One’s dance and death is infinitely repeated. The screenings
are arranged in two circles, with the soloists playing the Chosen One
dancing on the three screens of the inner circle, and the Old Wise Men
surrounding the Chosen One on the four screens of the outer circle.
The Rite of Spring was a co-production between the Zachęta — National
Gallery of Art and The Renaissance Society in Chicago. Premiere (with a fully
animated Dance of the Chosen One) took place at the Zachęta in 2002.