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May 29, 2026

Quote of the Day

When looking back, usually I’m more sorry for the things I didn’t do than for the things I shouldn’t have done.

~ Malcolm Forbes

This Day in History

May 29, 1913: Controversial ballet “The Rite of Spring” shocks audience in its Paris premiere. On the night of Thursday, May 29, 1913, the pioneering Russian ballet corps Ballet Russes performs Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring), choreographed by the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees in Paris. Now considered a triumph of early modernist dance, the performance elicited a powerful negative reaction from the audience. Some say it inspired a riot.

When the curtain went up in the newly constructed – and architecturally controversial – Theatre de Champs-Elysees, it seemed all of Paris society was there. There was great anticipation surrounding Diaghilev’s newest production; advance publicity for the ballet had called it real and true art, art that disregarded the traditional boundaries of space and time. Almost as soon as the curtain rose, the audience began to react strongly to the performance, starting with whistles and proceeding to hisses and howls as the dancers appeared. Originally titled The Victim, Stravinsky’s ballet portrayed a pagan celebration in which a virgin sacrifices herself to the god of spring. The music was dissonant and strange, while the choreography by Nijinsky marked a radical departure from classical ballet, with the dancers’ toes turned in and their limbs thrust at sharp angles instead of smooth, rounded curves.

As Carl Van Vechten, drama critic for the New York Sun later wrote, “The unruly audience became as much a part of the performance as the dancers and musicians: Some forty of the [protestors] were forced out of the theater but that did not quell the disturbance. The lights in the auditorium were fully turned on but the noise continued and I remember Mlle. Piltz [the dancer portraying the sacrificial maiden] executing her strange dance of religious hysteria on a stage dimmed by the blazing light in the auditorium, seemingly to the accompaniment of the disjointed ravings of a mob of angry men and women.”

In light of the horrifically destructive conflict that exploded in Europe barely one year later, the violent reaction to Le Sacre de Printemps came to seem like a logical and inescapable response to such an expression of nihilism and chaos. Against a background of growing nationalist fervor across the continent, French audiences were understandably anxious – about their own country’s declining influence in the face of Germany’s growing strength, about the seeming failure of traditional notions of morality and order and about what was to come.

Ojai Weather

Mostly sunny – High 71 / Low 44

Total rainfall for the season – 27.87

Lake Casitas water capacity – 99.4%