“NEW HYPE/ BALLET" : ON THE SUBJECT OF WHY I’M REMAKING NAJINSKY’S RITE OF SPRING” by BRONTEZ PURNELL

Musing on my remake of "Rites of Spring"

Golden Postures: “The Negro dance . . . is a rhythm of disintegration . . .” said Martha Graham and we all know the alcoholic white modernists of last century were oracles and how I wish it weren’t true (the disintegration part) and yes I often find it hard to find equilibrium and my arabesque lacks a certain poetic quality though I do not self-depreciate or need remind myself that God made all of this I am still sculpture and consider I was a man of forty before I danced in pointe shoes heard the ballet teacher say “Let the weight hang off you and on your ankles like your pelvis is lifted on a silver tray and like your head is hovering with the weight of a celestial crown or so help me, your neck from a noose” I give the illusion of floating when I’m in free fall from the vantage point of the audience I look like I’m flying but from this vantage point of me passed out on the floor looking upside down what could not be imagined or dreamed into existence I sometimes mistake streetlights for the moon or a stage light as epiphany like the Hanged Man I am Major Arcana I hang myself out of a self-inflicted predicament I see the world from a new perspective and don’t cry for me when you see me on the floor I am basking in my celestialness would you believe that I am happy? Every day the scorched me reintegrates and learns how to talk and walk again and again and again and over and over it’s all episodic two nooses pull me from my crown and my foot it’s giving erect posture and I’ve nothing to fear for I am held together by spine and not glue I do this dance every goddamn day my golden posture remains earned”

I remember being in this ballet class in my early 20’s when the teacher asked me who I regularly trained with. I told her that I trained at the Molonga Casquelourd (explain) and mostly trained in West African and had recently got a scholarship to dance in a Contemporary Haitian Company.

She looked excited.

“Wow! African dance! That’s older than what we do in here, sweetie!”

I was young and it had never occurred to me that in dancing the Diasporic religious and social dances, that I was doing a magic that was (purportedly) older than the written word.