Transauthorial Screendance: Stravinsky’s Exquisite Corpse, or Brief Notes on Creating an International Omnibus Project

Abstract

In honor of the first centenary surrounding the pivotal composition and ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 2013, Franck Boulègue and I coordinated a collective screendance project entitled Sacre/ilège(s). Created in collaboration with 65 international artists, we sought to explore the ongoing presence of Le Sacre du Printemps internationally and to harness its wide reaching artistic influence in order to create an omnibus cycle of films. While hundreds of stage versions of Le Sacre du Printemps exist, it has rarely been imagined for the screen and is normally identified with an individual artist's vision (Stravinsky's music, Nijinsky or Pina Bausch's choreography, among others). Diverging from these familiar components seemed a fitting tribute to a production whose original look and sound shook the cultural landscape of its era, affecting multiple generations of artists thereafter. This provided the impetus for our first foray into transauthorial screendance and raised a number of questions on the nature of collaboration, community, and authorship: What forms of collaboration are possible for the screen today? Does collaboration itself form a community? Does collaboration represent a compromise on the part of the individual artist or does it simply construct a larger authorial composite? Despite the significance of these questions throughout the history of art—and moving images in particular—these subjects are rarely addressed or explored at screendance platforms today.