Katarzyna Kozyra - Rite of Spring

In this work Katarzyna Kozyra processes Vaclav Nijinsky’s choreography of Igor Stravinky’s music using the tools of film and digital media. The subject of the Ballet is the sacrifice of a virgin to the God of Spring by the elders and wise men of the tribe. To awaken the Earth she must dance herself to death. Naked old people dance the characters instead of young dancers and genitals are interchanged between the sexes. When the film was shot, the dancers moved while lying on the ground; the sequences of movements were later connected with computer animation. Technology infuses the bodies incapable of swift movement with youthful zest, thus making the Dance of Death an allegoric representation of life and eternal rebirth. The artist presents a critique of mental taboos and accepted social roles again, like in other works of hers: she confronts us with the view of the aged body unclothed, as the old play the role of the young, and men that of women, undermining the determination of identity on a biological footing. By mixing past and present, she contrasts historical and mythic conventions of thought where death appears as the reverse side of life. The first version of this project called Dance Lessons, 2001 was shown at the Museum für Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, while its final form was presented in the Zachêta Gallery, Warsaw. In Budapest it fills the spacious Main Hall of the Museum with the installation comprised in total of 9 screens placed in two circles. „…The Dance of the Chosen Victim culminates in her death: the dancer falls and freezes in immobility, she dies so as to be brought to life - and this is the artist’s own decision - so as to be ‘animated’, raised from the dead as if by music and to take up her sacrificial dance once more. In this Rite of Spring, spring never comes, the ritual leading up to death goes on and on.”