I went to a concert earlier this week, for the first time in four years. Mainly to see Seeta Patel’s version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a re-interpretation which uses the Bharatanatyam (South Indian) dance style. The first half of the concert, given by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, consisted of two concert suites I was not particularly interested in - Nurymov’s The Fate of Sukhovey, and Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. Whether intentionally or not, though, the juxtaposition of these three very different works provided an interesting perspective of the different ways culture explores relationships between men and women, and between society and nature.
The Fate of Sukhovey Suite (Chary Nurymov, 1967)
This was a concert suite from the ballet, not the ballet itself. The Sukhovey in the title is a harvest-destroying dry wind that is a regular feature of summers in the steppes and semi-deserts of Central Asia. According to the programme notes, the ballet is about a young man and woman who work together to overcome numerous obstacles to divert water from the River Amu Darya. Their determination transforms the semi-desert of North Eastern Turkmenistan into fertile land,.
“It ends with the protagonists triumphantly achieving their goal, the Sukhovey’s fate being its symbolic vanquishing by the ingenuity of the human spirit.”
((Andrew Burn, BSO programme note, Nov 2023)
This sounds like a balletic representation of a typically socialist realist plot, with heroes, male and female, overcoming all odds and demonstrating by the end that the Party is correct and capable of achieving the brightest of all possible futures. I read the programme note just before the performance started, and something jarred. It was only on the way home from the concert that I realised what had jarred - the storyline must have been referring to a real event that I knew had ended not in a bright future, but in one of the worst ecological catastrophes of the late twentieth century - the draining of the Aral Sea.
Rising on the Afghanistan/Tajikistan border, the Amu Darya river flows north west along the Turkmenistan/Uzbekistan border into what was, until the 1960s, the fourth largest lake in the world. As part of Soviet policy to boost cotton production in Central Asia, huge amounts of water from the Amu Darya (and the Syr Darya, which also drains into the Aral Sea) were diverted into irrigation canals to encourage increased planting. Not only is cotton an incredibly thirsty crop, but much of the diverted water was wasted, soaked up by the desert, The resulting decline in river flows meant that the surface area of the Aral Sea in 2010 was a fifth of what it had been 50 years earlier, its water volume was a tenth of what it had been, and its salinity was 13 times greater. The role of the Aral Sea in regulating the climate throughout Central Asia has diminished , and there have been multiple adverse health impacts on the local population.
“Soviet scientists and policymakers condemned the Aral Sea as ‘Nature’s mistake’, a body of water that had no business existing, or commented that the Aral should ‘die beautifully’. But nature does not make such errors. Human fallacy, on the other hand, knows no limits - a lesson that the barren desert that once held a great sea should always bring to mind.”
(Reuel Hanks, ‘Louder than Words’: the destruction of the Aral Sea, Education about Asia, Spring 2021)
Any ‘ingenuity of human spirit’ shown by the protagonists of The Fate of Sukhovey was far outweighed by their arrogance in denying the reality of nature’s limits.
`The Sleeping Beauty Suite (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1890)
For this concert suite the BSO’s programme note didn’t mention the central element in the ballet’s storyline - a Princess who is compelled to sleep for 100 years, and can only be woken by the kiss of a Prince. I imagine we were expected to know this already. But anyone coming to this music for the first time would have been unaware that the ballet centres around stereotypical notions, common to nineteenth century ballets , twentieth century animated films, and the fairy tales on which they are based, of female passivity and male agency.
“Woman is the Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, she who receives and submits.”
(Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
Enough said.
The Rite of Spring (Igor Stravinsky, 1913)
I’ve heard the Rite of Spring as a concert work many times. I’ve only seen the ballet once, in the late 1960s, around the time when Nurymov’s ballet was first performed. Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography followed essentially the same storyline as the Diaghilev/Nijinsky original - a young maiden is forced to appease the gods by dancing to her death. Her sacrifice, it is suggested, is needed for the gods to reward the community with a good harvest. If I remember right, MacMillan’s version ended with the male community elders flinging the dead maiden’s body into the air.
I didn’t want to see again a ballet that put the emphasis on forced sacrifice, not regeneration. I loved performances of Stravinsky’s score though, and when listening to them tried to put the memory of the sacrifice aside, and focus instead on what Stravinsky had said about being inspired by the sound of the ice on Russia’s rivers cracking open as winter came to a close.
Seeta Patel’s choreography owes little to the moves of Russian ballet, or to a storyline where a young woman has to succumb to male power and die. The dancers in Patel’s Rite respond to the rhythms of nature conveyed by the music. The chosen one asks for sacrifice from all the community, linking everyone in a cycle from birth to life, death, and rebirth.
“The Sacrificed becomes the Divine into whom we must all submit. The Mother, the Earth, the Goddess. Nature herself. Stravinsky’s score is a visceral, pulsating heart filled with the life force of the Earth and all who reside within her.”
(Seeta Patel, BSO programme note, Nov 2023)
Being in an audience, on the same level as both the dancers and the orchestra, was an immersive experience, one that I think connected us all with the rhythms of nature. I shall not forget it.
The wider context
Great art should be able to speak for itself, without the need for interpretation. But knowing the wider context can help one’s appreciation of it. This week’s audience at Poole’s Lighthouse benefitted from programme notes in which Seeta Patel explained the intricacies of the Bharatanatyam dance style, how she used this in her choreography of the Rite of Spring, and how she was able to find a different and deeper meaning within the original storyline.
Reading a summary of the plot of The Fate of Sukhovey added to our appreciation of the message audiences were intended to take from it. But more would have been added if there was in addition some indication of the real life damage caused by the arrogant exercise of ‘human spirit’ in 1960s Turkmenistan. And the absence of an explanation of the basic storyline of The Sleeping Beauty prevented us from understanding the ubiquity of ballet storylines in which females are passive recipients of male attention or abuse.
There is in the UK currently a campaign to stop the National Trust, the charity which owns a number of historic properties, from mentioning the historical context of their existence - that many of them were built with the profits from slavery, for example, or in the case of Kingston Lacy (not far from Poole) that its early nineteenth century owner was driven into exile because he was gay. The campaigners, who call themselves Restore Trust, argue that providing context is a weapon in a ‘culture war’ - that it is divisive, and deters visitors. Polling suggests, though, that on the whole visitors prefer to learn about context than to have it ignored.
Knowing about context adds to most people’s appreciation of art, even when the context is disturbing. It can help us understand, too, how our perceptions of reality are filtered by culture and how this is presented to us.
Reading this made me reflect on the power of art to delight, instruct & move us. Thank you very much.