The Rite of Spring is returning to the stage of the Palais Garnier this autumn. In choreographer Pina Bausch's emblematic ballet, the dancers give body and soul on an earth-covered floor. It is a unique set which also offers an unusual insight into the key role played by the Paris Opera’s technical teams... Edouard Gouhier, Technical Director of the Palais Garnier, shares his recollections of the ballet’s creation in 1997 and reveals the manufacturing secrets of this rather special soil.

“When The Rite of Spring entered the Paris Opera Ballet’s repertoire in 1997, I was head of the research department at Garnier: I have very fond memories of that adventure, from the discovery of this powerful work requiring the total commitment of the dancers and also – and this was Pina Bausch’s intention – a high degree of involvement on the part of the technical crews.

At face value, the set appears very simple, since it is only comprised of a backdrop of black velvet side curtains and a thick cotton ground sheet upon which earth is spread to a depth of 15 centimetres over an area covering 13.5 metres by 18 metres. From the very outset, we purchased the soil – which is actually peat – from the same supplier in Germany: this was so it could be as close as possible to Pina Bausch’s own specifications.

One of the distinctive characteristics of “The Rite” is that we don’t lower the curtain whilst the scenery is being moved into place: members of the audience who choose to remain in the Itheatre during the intermission can watch the twelve stagehands bring nine large industrial waste bins each filled with a little over 600 kilos of earth. This is then spread across the floor and raked to create an even surface. All of this has to be done quickly and in a specific order… So it’s almost a choreographic operation in itself under the direction of the chief stagehand!

Pina Bausch drew a great deal of inspiration from day-to-day life and the things happening on the street… she liked to show things. The fact that the stagehands come out of the shadows is just a logical extension of that desire. Furthermore, those stagehands are often applauded at the end of the intermission. I don’t know if Pina had planned that, but in any case it gives some much-appreciated recognition for the stagehands whose profession rarely finds itself in the limelight. And I think they’re generally proud of that participation. They know what is going to transpire, the uncompromising physical commitment of the dancers and their own unconditional involvement. I can assure you that when you’ve spread and raked over five tons of earth in less than 20 minutes, you come out of there a little tired!

The set becomes a gunuine extension of the dancers' bodies as they run barefoot, tumble and rise, roll on the floor and end up covered in earth. There’s something highly primitive about it. In the same spirit, Pina Bausch’s company, the Tanztheater Wuppertal, dances the ballet on raw peat. Since 1997, for the security of the dancers, we have preferred to sift it to eliminate any foreign materials it might contain. The stagehands become “gardeners” since the soil must be tended and moistened to offer the optimum degree of dampness, so as not to be too muddy, too slippery, too volatile or too dusty… There’s an entire expertise involved in making it perfect for when the curtain rises. Dancers familiar with the production also help us find the right consistency.

Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring often closes a performance of ballets for technical reasons, because it takes a certain amount of time to clear up the earth after the performance, but I also believe that is true for dramaturgical reasons as well: the work is so powerful that it is difficult to follow it up with something else. With each new revival of “The Rite” it’s the same emotion, the same impact. It’s an immense pleasure and a source of great pride to work on a ballet of such strikingly powerful modernity.”

Interviewed by Juliette Puaux

On an empty stage covered only with a layer of earth, the dancers engage in a struggle as visceral as it is poetic to the point of exhaustion. The Paris Opera Ballet is the only company other than the Tanztheater Wuppertal to whom Pina Bausch entrusted her legendary work The Rite of Spring. This autumn, Étoile dancers Eleonora Abbagnato and Alice Renavand are performing the role of the Chosen One on the stage of the Palais Garnier. They look back on the ballet, their encounter with an outstanding artist and a choreographic experience which has left an indelible mark on both of them.

Eleonora Abbagnato
“I had the good fortune to be cast in The Rite of Spring when it first entered the Paris Opera Ballet’s repertoire in 1997. I had joined the Corps de Ballet the year before. I was still a quadrille at the time, and I was totally overawed to be auditioning alongside Patrick Dupond and Marie-Claude Pietragalla. During the audition, Pina wanted to see all the dancers of the company pass by in order to give each of us a chance, without differentiation for grade or seniority. Above all, it was the dancers' personalities that interested her. We began by rehearsing the circle, the starting point of the ballet and the major climax of the group. It is here that the work takes shape and coalesces on stage. Some very young dancers were selected. I myself was just eighteen at the time.

Pina first chose me to perform the role of the young girl who finds herself in the middle of the group at two points in the ballet—the one everyone protects for being the most fragile. She detected that fragility in me right away when she saw me dance at that first audition. She identified a singularity in each of us, a personality trait which was then reflected on stage. Each role within the group was attributed in a highly precise and thought-out way. Nothing was ever left to chance.

In rehearsal, Pina made us run a lot. She asked us to mark out diagonals in the studios as we ran so that we would learn how to free ourselves and let go. So for me, her ballet was synonymous with vitality and freedom. That initial discovery had a major impact on my career as a dancer and on my life. She opened me to a new field of possibilities. By offering The Rite of Spring to the Paris Opera Ballet, Pina taught us to feel like a real group on stage. We spent entire days together in the studio. Strong personalities from the company mingled with the Corps de Ballet. It was as if we all belonged to the same family.

I then had the good fortune to dance The Rite of Spring each time it was revived. I performed the Chosen One’s solo for the first time in 2002 and at the time, I was able to rehearse it with Pina. In the studio and on stage, the technical difficulty combines with the psychological distress that this ballet puts us through. Each evening is a new metamorphosis which drives us into a corner and forces us to come out of ourselves. I remember a time when my mother no longer wanted me to dance this ballet, because she no longer recognized me. The state into which we are plunged even distances us from the audience. During the final performances of Rite of Spring in 2015, I couldn’t even bring myself to take a curtain call, I needed some down-time to recover and grasp what had happened in the theatre. It was as if the ballet had been suspended in time.

It’s probably the last time I’ll be performing this role and the last time I’ll dance in The Rite of Spring. I’m 40 years old and I can already see my retirement on the horizon! It’s always odd to rehearse without Pina Bausch. Despite the quality and immense generosity of the current dance coaches, they don’t have her eye. Pina didn’t differentiate between the dancers. We were all viewed in the same way. She managed to calm us and give us confidence in ourselves. Ever since those early days at the Ballet School, most of us have grown with the pressure of having to be the best in order to stand out from the pack and be noticed. Pina pacified us. Meeting her was a privilege—a great artistic and human encounter”.

Alice Renavand
“I first danced The Rite of Spring in 1998. The ballet had entered the Paris Opera’s repertoire a year earlier. I had just joined the Corps de Ballet as a quadrille and I’d also gained some weight. During the audition for the group of women, Pina Bausch noticed me. I was sure I wouldn’t be picked given my physique, not least because the costume was very revealing, but I do remember having a lot of fun. Pina came to look for me at the back of the studio. She took me by the hand and asked me to dance. From that moment on, an unfailing relationship took root between the two of us and in particular, with this ballet which has followed me throughout my entire career. It was the first time that someone had looked upon me so kindly; I didn’t correspond to the canons of the company at that time and Pina brought me new-found self-confidence. She taught me to channel my anxiety and inner anger and vent it on stage. After that, I was cast in The Rite of Spring every time the ballet was revived on the stage of the Palais Garnier or on tour.

Then, in Epidaurus, Greece, on the evening of my birthday, Pina solemnly said to me: “The next time “Rites” is performed in Paris, you’ll dance the Chosen One; that’s it, you’re ready.” Unfortunately, in the interim, Pina Bausch passed away.

Since I first discovered it in 1997, the ballet has haunted me. At the time, I was already listening constantly to Stravinsky’s score and I enjoyed dancing to it alone. When I performed the role of the Chosen One for the first time in 2010, the coaches and members of the Tanztheater Wuppertal, Josephine Ann Endicott and Dominique Mercy, were there to guide me. Back then, I was still a Sujet. I began working on the ballet using video footage and I immersed myself in the score to grasp the work’s musical quality. The Chosen One’s solo has something exceptional about it that is taxing both physically and emotionally. Whatever the case, this ballet drains us. Dancing in the soil makes performing all the more difficult. In the studio, the first thing I learnt was to master the technique perfectly before I attempted the solo trance sequence. That trance haunts the ballet. All the dancers are taken to a second, quasi-primitive state. On stage, bonds are created and a solidarity passes through the group. We aren’t given any specific direction other than to let our emotions show through. Each performance is different. We can’t always anticipate where it will lead us.

Pina Bausch was a great choreographer and a great artist of her time. She assigned specific roles to each dancer and by doing so managed to reveal the unique qualities in each artist, but also in each individual. With me, she detected a deep sensitivity and anger. In 1998, I danced the role of the running woman. As time passed, I performed different roles depending on my emotions and my development as a young woman. It was as if the ballet were following me as I grew within the company. This ballet is a progression, a new challenge every evening. It’s as if it strips you bare, compounding the technical difficulty and its inherent intensely emotional charge.

Today, it’s bound to be the last time I perform the role of the Chosen One on the stage of the Palais Garnier. I’m 37 years old and I have extraordinary memories of the woman and the ballet. Pina infused me with a new vitality. She taught me how to breathe again, as if my torso were embracing life. She encouraged me to draw on emotions within me that I didn’t even know existed.”

They are seven years old when they arrive at Bigg’s farm. They will be thirty when they leave it. In the meantime, the clay girls till the earth, lived in the very ground and obey the orders and rules dictated by the man with the black trousers. Julien Dufresne-Lamy takes up Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring and her women of earth, providing a fictional tribute to women, rebellious, fragile and in love, who struggle to learn never to remain silent.   

The Clay Girls

We are Bigg’s four girls.
We don’t have first names.

We are seven years old and we already have a wonderful story to tell. We live on a farm bordered by pines and beehives. A farm near which grow coarse-haired scabious, green bamboo and carpets of moss. Bigg tells us we are very happy. In the earth, we don’t wear boots. We stay barefoot to touch the stones and the silt. We like to feel the crevices breathe. We have fun. We watch the calves being born. As we walk, we snap winter's last dead branches. We gather chervil and blackberries, we munch great mouthfuls of them, the juice spurts out, our faces turn into jam.

In his trousers that are always black, Bigg lets us play. He nicknames us the clay girls. We have to call him Bigg and nothing else. He’s the one who makes the rules. You have to go to bed early, not excite the animals. You have to hide in the barn when a visitor rings the bell at the bottom of the hill. Bigg trusts us. He doesn’t put the big steel padlock on the door anymore. We can stroke the calves in the straw and play mummies.

We are ten years old and we are all in love with Bigg. He tells us stories. Tales about the world before, when there were towns, roads, monuments. Big gathers us around him in his study, around him and his long white beard. He describes hurricanes and storms, which used to have women’s names. Coasts drowned by the ocean, forgotten beaches, tumours. Contaminated eggs, suicides, homosexual marriages. Bearded men in deserts chopping people’s heads off. The bloodthirsty bearded men, no connection with Jesus. In Bigg’s stories there are always ghosts, will-o’-the-wisps, a White Lady, frights and were-wolves. Vampires who lived in a wall called Wall Street.

On the farm, we share the work. No question of lounging about on the flagstones in the sun. Bigg keeps a notebook in which he assigns us our jobs. Milking the cows, planting out lettuces, cleaning out the gutters, churning the butter, we’re kept busy. We put cotton wool soaked in copper sulphate solution on the mare’s hooves and we prepare the soup at lunch and suppertime. Bigg continually tries to separate us. When we are all together, he imagines we snigger behind his back. He thinks the clay girls are plotting.

We are twelve years old with caramel gaze. Our breasts are forming, our hips are rounding out. On the ground, our hair forms brown patches, hiding the traces of the animals’ blood. Bigg slaughters them with a knife. Chickens, pigs especially and cows too, when they are said to have gone mad. One flick of the knife and hup! Blood soaks into the stones in the yard near the redcurrant bushes. Sometimes, Bigg cuts our hair with his knife. Bigg doesn’t like us to dirty the house or act like grand ladies. We are the clay girls. We must be modest, like the earth.

When we see the knife on the kitchen table, we take to our heels for the woods full of frogs. We run, pounding the peat with our feet, turning it into dust. Bigg always finds us. He gives us a real dressing down. Sometimes, we would like to get angry. We imagine paying him back, setting traps for him, like the cattle he leads to the slaughter. To feel better, we gather nettles so that our skin stings until nightfall.

When winter departs, Bigg opens the old Norman cupboard of varnished wood. He takes out grey fabric from the shelves and tells us to make ourselves long dresses, below the knee. We look at each other. We resemble women and we snigger.

We are fourteen years old and we are running off while Bigg has a kip. We’re getting out of here. We’re much too curious. After all those stories, we want to see if Bigg was telling the truth. On horseback, we go down the hill, the other two follow at a run. We hold hands. We are prudent. For fear of falling into the holes made by the cyclones and of getting caught by the mutants prowling around. Lower down, we discover farms like ours. It’s disappointing. Just tractors, right in the middle of the fields, wells, stables and other animals which have nothing diabolical about them. We’ve hardly had time to snoop around before Bigg arrives on his tractor. He looks furious. He tells us that God will punish us, sooner or later.

This happens on the first night of spring. Bigg comes and wakes us, armed with his hunting rifle. Pitch dark. Shouting, he enters the barn. He orders us to take our Bible and crawl over to the bunker. He yells out that acid rain is on its way. We stay in the shelter reciting verses from the Apocalypse. We listen to Bigg. In the bunker, there are steel benches fixed to the walls. Bigg has installed everything we need to survive. An electric generator. Water tanks, pipes, filament light bulbs and cartons of preserves without labels that we open with our teeth. A crucifix hanging up on high watches over us. We are fourteen and we live for a year under the ground. Bigg says that it’s our fault, he calls us vulgum pecus and makes us pray. We kneel on grains of rice scattered on the ground as a punishment. Forgive us, Lord.

Sometimes Bigg makes us pray all day. We chant out loud, in chorus, with our sisters. Bigg is brave, he puts on his gas mask and climbs the ladder to the armoured door. He disappears. When he comes back he says it’s the end of the world.

We come out of the ground, a year later. The forest is new. The trees have been cared for, the petals have resuscitated, but we can’t see anything. The light blinds us. It takes us a few minutes before we dare to breathe. Bigg signals to us to go ahead and we run, all four of us, towards the enclosures. The animals are safe and sound. God has protected them. It took a year of prayer to save the farm. We are mad with joy and we hug each other, the four of us, on the grass, in a ring. Bigg asks us to go back up. He smiles. He is happy to see his land again. But he takes hold of each of us by the arm and warns us that at the next error, the farm will go up in smoke and that we’ll finish up in the briar patch, devoured by mutants and wild boar.

We are fifteen years old. In the storehouse, we have discovered a trapdoor hidden under a mat. Below there is a trunk full of stuff. There’s an old machine that plays music, sweet melodies that leaden our eyelids. Memories recounted on tapes. It is our mothers who speak, and their mothers before them. They recount their life. In the trunk there are books, pencils, yellowed sheets of paper and atlases. There are photographs of clowns, department stores and animals in the jungle. There are photographs of women, of children and of theatres, photographs of tajines and bottles of coca-cola and mothers explaining what it all means. There are letters, bundles of them tied up with string. But we can’t read. Reading, that’s an illness, it means you believe any old thing and it’s evil brewing. There is also jewellery, necklaces like daffodils and buttercups. In the trunk, there are colours and smiles that look nothing like Bigg’s stories.

We are sixteen years old. We are fed up with the yearly round of seasons, with grunting pigs and cows giving birth. One after the other, Bigg takes us on one side. At last he shows us photos of our mothers. Our own mothers, all beautiful with crowns of carnations on their heads. Bigg gives us each a red dress, he tells us it is time. We keep them carefully under our beds of straw and, before Bigg chooses us, we rub them with oat milk flakes until they shine in the afternoon sun. When night falls, Big gathers us like flowers. He tells us we are radiant in our red dresses. Bigg is kind. He always turns out the light.

We are seventeen years old and there are no more mysteries. In secret, we learn to read and write. We sneak away to the attic to decipher our mothers’ letters. It takes us several years to decode them, to translate, to untangle the loops, to understand the umlauts, the capitals and the sound of the vowels. We search for meaning.

We are twenty and we are writing in our turn. Like our mothers. A few words every day before we get on with our tasks. Bigg calls us his women now. We are no longer the clay girls. We are the women of the earth. He has chosen us and we prostrate ourselves before him. In the evening, before we join Bigg, we return to the storehouse, one after the other. We write down the story of the bunker and the mutants who do not exist.

We are twenty-five years old. We have children. Girls. A single girl, that’s the rule. We are forbidden to give them names but we do it anyway. We call them Luzule, Violette, Polygala, like the flowers that grow secretly in the woods. Bigg looks at them tenderly. But one of us gave birth to a stillborn baby. With the farm animals, it often happens. The baby was a boy. At first, we thought he was breathing, that he had cried, but Bigg ordered us not to interfere. He left the room with the body under his arm. That evening, we disappeared into the woods to organise the funeral and we cried hot tears all four of us in our grey dresses.

We stay there watching the slanting forest crush the sky. We no longer know if we are sisters and whether we live in a house full of love or of anger.

We are thirty years old. Bigg takes our photographs. Close-ups taken in front of the stone doorway. Bigg makes us parade. He tells us we are old and tired, that our hands are blotchy and our memories askew. He tells us that, deep down, we are seventy years old. Our daughters play in the woods with branches of cedar and sprigs of mint. They are beautiful. They are the clay girls now. Our own faces are grey. We have no more strength to write. It is the end of winter. Bigg announces that God wants us by His side.

One morning, as the dew is evaporating, Bigg accompanies us to the woods. God is waiting for us. We hold hands, the four of us. We look at the tender green of the thickets, the swaying of the rivers and the first buds peeking innocently through the moss. We follow Bigg to the depths of the trees and silently we pray. We pray painlessly and gently. We pray for extravagant things, we pray that our daughters sleeping in the padlocked barn will learn never to keep silent.

In the storehouse before leaving, we opened the trunk one last time. On a pale bed of scabious flowers, we placed our journal. We left it for our daughters, to our women, to the survivors, to the rebels, to the little ones in their hands who are still singing. We offer it to females, to infidels, to the fragile and the pagan. To the numberless, to the deaf, to those whose struggle is over, to those who are in love, to all those who, like us, die in the forest believing in miracles.