It's all been done before: Yvonne Rainer on "RoS Indexical"

RoS Indexical is Yvonne Rainer’s radical re-vision of The Rite of Spring, the brilliant and controversial collaboration betweenchoreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and composer Igor Stravinsky which shocked Paris audiences in 1913 with its “primitive” movement vocabulary and dissonant musical score. In RoS Indexical, “Rainer not only destabilizes the notion of The Rite of Spring as an iconic achievement in dance history, she allows us to see that a work may live on in greatly altered form” (Marcia B. Siegel, The Hudson Review).

Yvonne Rainer: "I wouldn't say that I'm doing a remake here. . . .I also don't think of what I'm doing as an interpretation, which requires an original. And it's certainly not a reconstruction. The very notion of reconstruction in this case--which, I think, is what Millicent Hodson called her Rite of Spring for the Joffrey Ballet in 1987--is a fuzzy one. Because how do we know exactly what Nijinsky's dance was? It wasn't filmed. Relying on photos, drawings, and hearsay, we can create only an imagined approximation. . . But the questions persist. Historical memory is so very questionable. I've been using the term re-vision to describe what I'm doing: It's my vision, bringing all these matters of re-creation, remaking, reconstruction, history, and faulty memory overtly (and covertly!) into play. . . But it's important that the four dancers I'm working with are very different in age (from thirty to sixty years old), technique, and individual history. They are not a traditional ensemble. . . --and so a kind of distantiation is created, you might say, from any notion of unity and harmony. A knowledgeable spectator will, I hope, have a very complex experience at RoS: It may evoke flashes of what you think the original was, or of memory of other versions of the dance, whether Pina Bausch's or Michael Clark's. I hope it will create a many-layered experience of dealing with your own knowledge, expectations, and associations, with all these fractious elements suggesting the very impossibility of an authentic template. . . I think of RoS Indexical as both pedagogy and entertainment, a kind of pedagogical vaudeville. Nijinsky and Stravinsky may well turn over in their graves. But then again, they might just giggle in spite of themselves. . . . The Rite of Spring was one of those moments where the conventions of ballet and Western harmony were totally challenged, torn apart. But today Rite is an entry in the pantheon of dance history, and Stravinsky's music has also achieved that canonical status--and so I've sought to bring it down to earth both historically and aesthetically. It is the earthiness, you might say, of both the dancing and the sound track that hopefully makes you deal more critically with ideas of authenticity and beauty, even while I create a kind of homage. (I always like to have my cake and eat it.) It's about having a public conversation with your antecedents, foregrounding that fact rather than submerging it as if everything you do comes out of your own unique imagination. That's never the case with me. One can't escape history, even when so much work is unconscious in that regard; you can--and must, I add with a little trepidation--always relate the
present to the past." From:

Douglas Crimp "1000 words: Yvonne Rainer talks about Ros Indexical,
2007". ArtForum. FindArticles.com. 12 Apr, 2009.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_3_46/ai_n30953983/