Stravinsky Rite Of Spring

'The Rake's Progress' deserves, and got, laughs | Philadelphia Inquirer | 2011 ...

PRINCETON - Igor Stravinsky's theatricality often seemed to exist more in his musical imagination than in any external staging. How often has The Rite of Spring been choreographed all that successfully?

So the belly laughs that greeted Stravinsky's 1951 neoclassic opera The Rake's Progress in a new Princeton Festival production were as surprising as they were warranted in a work whose composer and librettists (W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman) were among the wittiest individuals of their time but created an opera whose laughs tend to be quiet and cerebral.

What made the difference here Sunday was a capable cast, the X-ray intelligence of Steven LaCosse's staging, and a factor that, by itself, should be worth the drive for next Sunday's performance: the size-appropriate McCarter Theater.

Character-driven laughs truly register in this 1,100-seat house. Thus, the opera itself (which is hardly as sturdy as La Boheme ) projected more momentum than usual, overriding occasional moments when singers and orchestra struggled and the spare production gave only a sketchy sense of time and place. Those who were overheard at intermission complaining about the opera's lack of tunes nonetheless stayed to the end. And why wouldn't you?

Tunes or not (and they are there), The Rake's Progress is a heap of fun. Stravinsky aped Mozart and Rossini on the surface (and enjoyed the pretense of doing so) in a classic deal-with-the-devil morality tale that takes a young man away from his sweetheart and into dissolute 18th-century London, where he marries a sideshow freak (Baba the Turk) and ends up in Bedlam.

Behind the intricate libretto's art-for-art's-sake rhymes, Stravinsky's music had a humanity not always apparent in higher-concept productions. This one went in for ornate period costumes, leaving the London cityscapes and lonely graveyards to be conveyed with shadow silhouettes on the screen - framed and facilitated by old-fashioned footlights. You were reminded in a gentle Brechtian way that this is indeed theater (as opposed to a refraction of real life). Also in that spirit, the epilogue was sung by singers in backstage makeup robes. Less-obvious smart touches were everywhere: Choruses that can merely bustle made key dramatic points.

Anzu Furukawa: The Rite of Spring (Satis Shroff) | XMS Mail Server ...

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             Anzu Furukawa and The Rite of Spring (Satis Shroff)

I’d frequently seen an outsized portrait of Anzu Furukawa in Wolfgang Graf’s property, and when we talked about Anzu and he mentioned, “My very own expertise with Anzu came in 1999, in the course of the San Francisco Buto Festival. I participated in her workshop and found her to be a good teacher, in a position to communicate effectively to her college students in spite of the fact the her English was somewhat limited. She employed humour to break the tension that so frequently can hamper a student from learning. That same humour was communicated in her overall performance of a single of her most renowned operates, Crocodile Time.”

Anzu Furukawa was born in Tokyo in 1952. She studied in 1972-75 below professor Yoshiro Irino in the Toho-gakuen College of Music. She worked because 1973 as a choreographer, performer and scenarist in various groups in Japan and Europe on several international festivals. Among others she also worked in 1979 as a solo dancer in the Dairaku-kan buto group. An achieved ballet dancer, modern day dancer, studio pianist for ballet businesses and a student of modern composition of music in addition to being both a teacher and performer of Buto dance.

In this connection it is needed to speak about the Buto. ‘What is ‘Buto?’ you may possibly ask.

Buto is a school of modern Japanese dance which was born at the turn of the fifties and sixties. Buto dance has also influenced the improvement of dance in Finland and in Europe in general.  Buto was born amid the upheavals in Japan,  in the atmosphere characterised by student revolts, performance acts and agitation prop. The founder of the school was Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), who came from Northern Japan to Tokyo.  He began with violent and anarchistic dance performances, soon after which his relations with the official school of Japanese dance have been cut off. In his later operate, he designed a type of standard method for buto, which, even so, differed from Western aesthetics.  An additional “first generation buto artist“ is Kazuo Ohno (1906-) who also visited Finland.

Anzu gave her debut in 1973 as a  director and choreographer with the 1st piece “grand conceptual opera” SALOME TALE at the German Cultural Centre in Tokyo. From 1974 till 79 she worked as a soloist in the dancer performance  Dairaruda-kan directed by Akaji Maro. She also worked with Carlotta Ikeda, Ko Muroboshi, Ushio Amagatsu.

The rite of spring

The Rite of Spring

Rite of Spring

The rite of spring (Le sacre du printemps)

The rite of spring, sketches, 1911-1913