The Rite
I didn’t blink the first time I watched the Joffrey Ballet reconstruction of the Rite of Spring. I was so struck I remember what the room looked like, it was a small room where we held seminars in college — the blue upholstered university chairs, the cart with the television and VHS (this was 1991 or ‘92). I was fascinated by the ballet, by the reconstruction of it, and in my memory I didn’t blink for the entirety of the piece. It felt like being slapped. It remains one of my favorites.
I saw a production a few years ago at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with the touring Joffrey company, and it had lost none of its power. For me, it’s a visceral exercise, watching a virgin picked to be sacrificed, danced to fatigue and chosen for death. The music, the choreography, the design, all merge to create this scene of magnetic horror. Afterwards, I ran into a friend in the lobby with her grandmother. She can be critical and she said, “I don’t care. I mean, what are we supposed to get out of this.”
Other than that awful feeling of someone saying something dismissive after you’ve told them you were deeply affected, I was thinking you get what we do. We still do it. As humans. I thought of that again this week.
A friend told me that a family member of his partner’s had died of COVID that the whole family had gotten after attending a funeral mass last month and then going to breakfast together. They had Thanksgiving together as well. This week, they’re having a mass for her. Funeral rites, which caused the death, will be performed to commemorate the death, possibly leading to more?
I thought of this ritual as I watch scenes of people going to airports to travel for the holiday. That strange American exceptionalism (“It won’t happen to me”) along with American selfishness and a five year-old’s idea of freedom (“You can’t tell me what to do”) have mixed into a toxic brew. Even though we’ve been asked not to gather, to think of others, it somehow is just too much for people to miss one ritual. One rite. One celebration. I’ve even heard people saying their relatives are getting older and they’d like to see them before they die, knowing perhaps they could be the ones to kill them.
In Shirley Jackson’s classic story The Lottery, one woman is picked for sacrifice, and though she’s part of the community, as soon as her lot is chosen people turn on her and begin to stone her. It’s just what that community does. Everyone accepts it. It’s the ritual. It’s the rite. Or if you like, the right. My right. It’s my right to do this.
Seasons turn, sometimes it’s the rite spring, sometimes it’s the rite of winter. We no longer believe that we need human sacrifice for the crops to grow, though I will gently point out that Christmas is the celebration of a birth of the human sacrifice Christianity is based on. We still need our scapegoats. We still draw lots. We still, for some reason, hold on to our rituals of community above life. The rationale, I suppose, has been that these rituals are what create the community and give us reason to live. I hope this season they are not having the exact opposite effect. We need no more dancers to die.
Stay home.
