Le sacre du printemps

Marked by the urban chaos of the Nigerian capital, where he had resided, Heddy Maalem built on Stravinsky’s music to reveal the violence of the world, and the interweaving of life and death.

« It was dawn, Stravinsky premiered Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), something completely unexpected, unheard of. We heard a hymn, an ode to Nature, the music of a world, of life, of something growing green again. We know now he was composing a song, the voices of the forces inside the spiral of the unescapable darkness. Spring after spring, one war vomits out the next – and the soft green-ness of the new leaves does not last.
It is the beginning of a new dawn.
Le Sacre has been performed a thousand times, unforgettable yet always new, with the same shocking joy overflowing out of time, out of the ages, an edge, the alliance of the arches, the high sound of the grass being cut by a scythe, stalking an animal, its charge, a stream running over and under the earth, the inexplicable rhythm of fires burning at night, a line of shrieks blotting out a whimper. Unstoppable violence. How we would have liked to not have heard the death knell of the old drums, their power, their deep vibrations which encourage the idea: animate, then kill.
Our dawn finds us enmeshed in the process of recognizing the forces knotting our bodies, we are dancing. To the same chord, united in complete dis-harmony to celebrate this Sacre, dancing what is dead, what lives again and will die. Show the ritual, that which mixes death with life, bones and ash. To say again what a man does to celebrate the gift of such a terrible joy. To breathe this rhythm for the first and last time, when the veil drops before our eyes.
And Africa – a whole continent contained in the space which separates the day as it ends, from the beginning of the next one, daybreak. The end and the beginning of the world, a world on its knees when Stravinsky saw Red suns coming up in the East. A continent from which springs – at the same time as a promise – the thickening anguish of spring.
An earth withstanding the great leap forward of the universe, the force of Tomorrow ever present.
A last kingdom where we are now walking »

Source : Heddy Maalem – June 2003