Stravinsky's Rite of Spring - 100th anniversary

Yesterday marked the one hundredth anniversary of the first performance of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky. It caused a riot.  Here is a production from the Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg.





Now watch the famous floor routine by 1988 Olympian, 1989 World all around bronze medallist Olga Strazheva, set to an extract of the same music, drawing on Nijinsky's choreography.

I remember the impact this made on first viewing at the Stuttgart World Championships. It is impressive for more than the difficulty of the tumbling, the line of the leaps or the accuracy of the spins. It is a whole routine from start to finish; every single movement carries consistent visual sense. There are no transitions. Clearly derivative, the routine is a prominent example of the sport's links to dance and of Soviet Russia's philosophy of sport as culture. It provides an exclamation mark to their creative sporting tradition that at times elevated gymnastics to an art form. The Soviet team employed choreographers from Moscow's Bolshoi Theatre to assist in the choreography of floor routines for the 1989 national team members, and it showed.

Strazheva's routine is not the only one. There are many more Soviet floor routines from which similar comparisons could be drawn. Russian gymnastics borrows from ballet traditions, even today. The influence is about more than dance composition and toe point, has little to do with body type and is evident in more than just the floor. National beam choreographer for the 2012 Olympics, Larissa Ushakova, spoke of how she continued to study dance throughout her career. Former Soviet national coach, Vladimir Zaglada, said in an interview on this blog, dance is in Russia's blood. The diversity of the country's cultural roots is expressed in all its work. Implicitly, sport does not exist in a vacuum.

There are other examples of floor routines set to this music, but they pall by comparison to the great Strazheva, the authenticity of her dance composition and the quality of expression. This powerful gymnast was Ukrainian by birth, but her floor routine is Russian to its very bones.