Music – Dance – Space
The Visualization of Le Sacre du Printemps

'Klaus Obermaier Klaus Obermaier

The epoch prior to World War I, the time in which Stravinsky was composing Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), was characterized by an ecstatic desire to experience the intensity of life, an emotion that would later mutate into an equally euphoric enthusiasm for war. In tune with this time, Stravinsky conceived Le Sacre as an orgiastic mass ballet. The dissolution of social structures is reflected in his having taken leave of conventional compositional forms of development and structures; in their stead are fragmentary, batch-like serial arrangements of the individual movements; abrupt shifts; music in different keys and rhythms superimposed upon one another.

Now, nearly a hundred years later, the issue of the day is the authenticity of experience in the light of the ongoing virtualization of the spaces in which modern life is played out. It’s the dissolution of our sensory perception, of the space-time continuum, the blurred dividing line between real and virtual, fact and fake that takes us to the limits of our existence.

The discrepancy between subjective perception and seemingly objective perception produced by stereoscopic camera systems whose images are filtered and manipulated by computer constitutes the basis of my staging of Le Sacre du Printemps.

The immersion of the “chosen ones” in virtuality, their fusion with music and space, as an up-to-date “sacrifice” for uncertain Newness, as metaphor of redemption and anticipation of the eternal happiness that new technologies and old religions promise us. Or at least as a new dimension of perception.

In conventional productions of Le Sacre, choreographers and dancers work to the music. In this case, though, the dynamism and structure of the music interactively transform the virtual presence of the dancer and her avatars and thus produce a sort of “meta-choreography.”

Stereo cameras transfer dancer Julia Mach into a virtual three-dimensional space. Time-strata and unusual perspectives overlay one another and duplicate themselves, and give rise to completely novel insights into the human body and its sequences of movements. Musical motifs interactively influence and manipulate these 3-D projections. Music is no longer just the choreography’s point of departure; it’s the consummation of the choreography.

Stereo projection as virtual stage