Marcela Giesche
Choreographer I
Performer I Teacher
Sacre
A choreographed ritual of work and destruction to the famous musical work of Igor Stravinsky - Le Sacre du Printemps.
The piece begins as an installation - a fully grown fir tree is seen suspended upside down hanging like a carcass from the constructed truss. The first note of the music signals the beginning of the performance as a professional woodworker, enters the performance space. During the next 20 minutes the tree is systematically dissected and taken apart through diverse traditional and modern woodworking techniques. The actions and sounds of the work are rhythmic and cyclic - in complement and sometimes also in competition with the rhythms in the music. Each cycle brings the performer closer to the core of the tree's trunk, which with his last action is split, cracked and splayed open for the audience to see. There is no end product, no goal, no symbol left behind from the performers actions, the movements of the the work are the dance itself.
Through the ritualistic and musical context of the Sacre the tree is framed and presented as the living being that it is - leaving us with the questions: 'What do we as a modern society sacrifice daily, for our dreams, wishes, aesthetics and ideals? Do we even acknowledge these sacrifices, and how do we justify them?'
This project is currently in further development with the aim to create a cinematic film of the work together with director Salma Chedaddi.
Concept and Direction: Marcela Giesche
Light Design: Pablo de Fontdevilla
Music: Sacre du Printemps - Part 1 by Igor Stravinky
Performance: Paul Schulz
Production: Lake Studios Berlin,commisioned by
HAU Berlin for SACRE 100 Festival
Premiere: 14 & 15 November, 2013, HAU 2 Berlin
Trees: provided by Josef Vorholt, Revierföster Müggelsee
The following poem was an inspirational source
for the original composition of Igor Stravinsky as well
as a reference point for the work.
Yarila
By Sergey Gorodetzky (1884–1921)
First to sharpen the ax-flint they bent,
On the green they had gathered, unpent,
They had gathered beneath the green tent.
There where whitens a pale tree-trunk, naked,
There where whitens a pale linden trunk.
By the linden tree, by the young linden,
By the linden tree, by the young linden,
The linden trunk
White and naked.
At the fore, shaggy, lean, hoar of head,
Moves the wizard, as old as his runes;
He has lived over two thousand moons.
And the ax he inhumed.
From the far lakes he loomed
Long ago.
It is his: at the trunk
The first blow.
And two priestesses in their tenth Spring
To the old one they bring.
In their eyes
Terror lies.
Like the trunk their young bodies are bright,
Their wan white
Hath she only, the tender young linden.
One he took, one he led,
To the trunk roughly wed,
A white bride.
And the ax rose and hissed—
And a voice was upraised
And then died.
Thus the first blow was dealt to the trunk.
Others followed him, others upraised
That age-old bloody ax,
That keen flint-bladed ax:
The flesh once,
The tree twice
Fiercely cleaving.
And the trunk reddened fast
And it took on a face.
Lo,—this notch—is a nose,
This—an eye, for the nonce.
The flesh once,
The trunk twice—
Till all reddened the rise
And the grass crimsoned deep.
On the sod
In the red stains there lies
A new god.