I referred fleetingly to the film 'Rhythm is it' in a posting about Dance Screen Brighton and subsequently in an article about the festival for Dance Now. I've intended to write a more engaged piece, and that I have done in this article, which appears in next week's edition of The Tablet.
It’s sixteen years ago this week since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today some of the city’s ritziest shopping streets are a short walk from the former Checkpoint Charlie. But get on a tram from Mitte, head further east, and it is soon clear that Berlin remains a deeply divided city. Drab suburbs, relics of the communist years, stretch for miles. The children who live there have few expectations of life, conditioned, almost malignly, to believe that there is little they can do to transcend their limits.
Enter the choreographer Royston Maldoom, splendiferous, headshaven, pixieish, in his early sixties. To adults he might seem a little over the top, but he has a gift with young people. Two hundred and fifty of them, many sceptical at first, were beginning rehearsals for Maldoom’s version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring accompanied by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. A powerful documentary Rhythm is it, by Enrique Sánchez Lansch and Thomas Grube records their progress and the eventual performance in Berlin's Treptow Arena.
In Russian the Rite is known as Vesna Sviaschennaya, ‘holy spring’. At its Ballets Russes premiere in Paris in 1913, members of the audience shouted and threw punches at each other in one of the great theatrical riots of the twentieth century. Stravinsky’s music and Nijinsky’s choreography challenged all the conventions of music and classical dance. In the ballet scenario, a Slav tribe from the northern steppes sacrifices a virgin to the cosmic forces that induce the spring. She dances herself to death. Stravinsky’s score depicts the dramatic suddenness of spring in the far north. The frozen ground cracks open, the days grow long, and the earth flowers.
For Royston Maldoom it is a powerful metaphor. “The notion that we sacrifice so that the earth may blossom again is something we have clearly forgotten. Our problem today is that we are prepared to sacrifice our children and their future for our own very short-term selfish gains.”
Many of Maldoom’s young performers are from broken homes. They have almost no experience of dance, and little instinct for the power of stillness – essential, if the project was to work. Young Martin has to fight his inhibitions. He has never danced and doesn’t like physical contact. “It’s hard for me to approve something, to say yes to it.” Olayinka from Nigeria is an orphan: both of his parents were murdered and he has lived in Berlin for six months. He wants to belong and, he says, “I want to be challenged. For now, God has created me alone, so I have to be strong.”
Maldoom is obsessive. He coaxes, harangues and teases. He is struck by the children’s inarticulate bodies, many of them already, even in their early teens, inscribed with defeat. Carriage of the body, Maldoom reminds them, is an outward expression of their inner worlds. “Don’t think you are just doing dancing. You can change your life in a dance class!” “Raise your arms high”, he tells them, as he walks around the studio decoding their bodies: “I think this guy will be anything in life he wants to be.” To another: “This guy also! But he doesn’t know it yet. He’s still afraid. He has a lot of power, but he doesn’t believe it”.
Ostensibly a dance film, Rhythm is it is an extended piece of sociology, which also stands in the best traditions of hero-teacher films such as Être et avoir or Stand and Deliver. Maldoom rails at a culture that conditions young people to a future with low expectations. “To pretend that discipline is unimportant”, says Maldoom, “is not fair to them. Without it we do not have a future. Nothing in their world supports the notion that things are not just fun on the surface – that they can enjoy the concentration and the seriousness.”
Maldoom is a wounded healer. He was born in London and his mother was invalided in childbirth. She died when he was four. His father remarried and they went to live on an isolated farm where he was an unhappy child. He left home at 17. Then he saw Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dance: “The light went on and, I thought, 'That was the passion'.”
Maldoom’s ingrained hurt – it drives him to this day, and you sense it when you meet him - gives the film much of its force. Woven through it too are Simon Rattle’s own teenage vulnerabilities. “At school you often wish you were popular. I was a pretty strange duck and only my best friends knew about Simon the musician. Only on becoming a musician did I find my real friends.”
In funding the project Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic are motivated both by social conscience and by pragmatism. The city of Berlin is virtually bankrupt; the orchestra cannot take its traditional funding for granted. Rattle came to the city, determined to reach a new audience. He had heard of Maldoom's previous work with street children in Ethiopia, and so the idea for a community arts project centred on the Rite was born. The film itself, now released on DVD (Boomtown Media 01399, EAN: 4042564013955), has won prizes at many film festivals. Its producers hope for a general release in Britain and there have been some arthouse showings.
The controversy surrounding the 1913 premiere is the subject of Riot at the Rite, to be shown shortly on BBC2, one of the highlights of the channel’s winter drama season. The film’s incorrigible sensuality mirrors that of the Ballets Russes era, and includes Millicent Hodson's reconstruction of Nijinsky’s original choreography. As the film closes, Stravinsky along with his collaborators Nijinsky, Roerich and Diaghilev sip champagne, the audience’s cheers and catcalls still ringing in their ears. In Kevin Elyot’s screenplay, Stravinsky (Alex Jennings) proposes a toast: “To innovation, great art, and good conscience.”
In Berlin, Maldoom and Rattle have to their credit a similar act of good conscience. Projects to make the arts more socially inclusive often fail, because they are not rooted in people’s own experiences. The point of departure must be a personal realisation, not an imposed experience, in Rattle’s words, when people realise the arts are “not a luxury, but rather a necessity, which they need like the air they breathe and the water they drink.“
Rhythm is it website
Film trailer
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