Strap in, you uncultured heathens, because today we’re going to the fucking ballet.  Because we’ve got class, don’t we, dear reader?  Damn right.

Rewind to May 29, 1913, when Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées became ground zero for a creative detonation that’d leave the arts bleeding and begging for more. Igor Stravinsky, a mad Russian genius with a penchant for sonic mayhem, unleashed The Rite of Spring—a ballet so raw, so primal, it made the powdered-wig crowd lose their goddamn minds. No tutu-and-slippers affair, this; this is a feral, earth-shaking ritual that’d ripple into the literary sphere like a tidal wave crashing through a library.

The setup alone is a fever dream: Stravinsky’s score is nuts (at least it was considered so then), all jagged rhythms and dissonant howls, conjures a pagan rite where a young girl dances herself to death to appease the gods of spring.  The premiere was a straight-up scandal. The audience rioted—fists flying, boos drowning out the orchestra—because this wasn’t art as they knew it; this was a declaration of war on tradition. Stravinsky later said he’d never seen such a “terrifying” reaction, and Nijinsky (the choreographer) had to shout counts from the wings just to keep the dancers on beat amid the chaos.

Why does this matter to a literary fiend? Because in addition to pretty much breaking music and dance,  The Rite of Spring cracked open the cultural psyche, inspiring writers to chase that same raw, untamed energy. Modernist scribes like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, already stirring the pot with their own rule-breaking verse, found a kindred spirit in Stravinsky’s rebellion. You can draw a straight line from the ballet’s savage pulse to the apocalyptic undertones of Eliot’s The Waste Land, published just nine years later in 1922.

This event, a glorious middle finger to the establishment, redefined what art could be. It dared to be ugly, to be real, to rip the veil off human nature and show the blood beneath. On May 29, 1913, Stravinsky lit a fuse that’d burn through the century, and we’re still feeling the heat. In that same spirit, let’s write something today that’d make the old guard clutch their pearls all over again.

N.P.: “Hau Ruck 2025” – KMFDM