The pandemic turned everyone into bargain basement Beckett characters, didn’t it? Waiting for something that wasn’t coming, performing rituals in squares on screens, and here’s Aleta Hayes doing the honest work: admitting that rites of spring might just be imagined anyway, might always have been a kind of mass hallucination we agreed to because the alternative was admitting we’re just mammals waiting for warmth.
And we’re calling it “intermedia” which is academic-speak for “we’re doing whatever the fuck works,” cobbling together Zoom windows and actual bodies in space, making art the way you’d make a meal from whatever’s left in the fridge after week three of lockdown. Not because it’s clever. Because it’s necessary.
The whole thing probably looks like nothing you’d recognize as either riot or spring, but that’s precisely why it matters. It’s the document of trying, of people refusing to let the moment just be dead time, choosing instead to make it mean something even if meaning had to be jerry rigged from duct tape and desperation and the sheer bloody minded insistence that bodies in motion still constitute a language even when nobody can be in the same room.
That’s the real rite of spring right there: not Stravinsky’s calculated savagery, but this: the decision to create when creation seems pointless. The performance of giving a shit.
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Riot of Spring: Inspired by realized and imagined rites of spring, this intermedia Chocolate Heads project interpolates “liveness”, seeks communion and finds love. Rehearsed and filmed partially over Zoom and in landmark locations on the Stanford campus, Riot of Spring is a glowing testament to a compelling and irresistible collaboration. Choreography: Aleta Hayes; Director of Photography and Visual Design: Jamie Lyons; Music: Harriet Brown.