The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!
Third rule of Fight Club: avoid "Le Sacre du printemps".
The 29 of May 1913 in Paris "Le Sacre du printemps" premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. It was a new ballet and orchestra concert work by Stravinskij with the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and...
A brawl by the audience.
After the success of the Bird of Fire and Petruska the expectations on Stravinskijs work where really high. At that at the concert there was also Ravel, Casella and Saint-Saëns and also Coco Chanel, so imagine the importance of the audience!
The composition and the choreography were really avant-garde for the period, there were unusual rhythm and dancers that were jumping and acting, someone said, like primitive monkeys. After not so much that the concert started the audience split in two factions; In one the people started chatting and shouting things like "Boo"or leaving the theater outraged and the other part of the audience was trying to shut them up .
At a certain point also the "quite" party started yelling too with "Bravo" and clapping hands to go against the unsatisfied people and the mess gone on and on with shoutings and shoves for all the first act.
Stravinskij left his seat and went behind the curtains of the theater and he saw the choreographer Nijinskij yelling and counting "1 2 3 4..." while he was banging his feet on the floor to help the dancers with the Tempo! Everything was out of control until the end.
It's funny how one of the most important works of our time was rated by Le Figaro, the most important paper at the time, like a "childish barbarism". Now this is a funny story in an extreme contest, but I would like a little more active criticism nowadays and not only a thumb up on a device behind a screen.
Ian