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This chapter discusses an alternative to the structural listening proposed by Rose Subotnik is presented. This alternative approach rejects Subotnik's notion that one must choose between binary opposites. It considers structural elements as gestures, which do not represent meanings within abstracted two-dimensional spatial graphs, or communicate them through association or reasoning by analogy, but rather constitute part of the meaning of the original work as a performance event. The essay also critiques Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Richard Taruskin, who based on musical analysis, has provided ideological or philosophical critiques of Le Sacre. This chapter particularly questions the way these two authors defined human subjectivity based on immanent musical form, and how they use their conclusions to determine the humane value of Le Sacre. It also questions their structuralist analyses of Le Sacre by offering an alternative reading that recognizes the importance of bodily gesture in danced works of music.

The Prologue investigates The Rite of Spring in a triangular reading. It juxtaposes an analysis of Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography with two signature texts on the piece, which are also key documents of early twentieth-century gestural theory: Theodor W. Adorno’s chapter on Stravinsky in his 1949 Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music), and Jacques Rivière’s 1913 essay entitled “Le Sacre du printemps.” Sacre is considered a primal scene of modernist gesturality, as the moment at which the revolutionary power and conceptual reach of gesture become discernible. The Prologue carves out a theory of gesture that defines the gestural as a form of interruption of the flows of music and movement. Gesture is associated with a punctuating and punctuated energy that is considered as an aesthetic strategy of productive impairment that not only manifests, but also critically exposes the primitivism which is Sacre’s signature trait.

The first English performance by Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes of Le Sacre du Printemps on 11 July 1913 took place a few weeks after one of the grimmest events in the militant suffrage campaign. On 4 June Emily Howard Davison stepped in front of King George V’s horse Anmer during the Derby, subsequently dying of her injuries. This chapter identifies comparable freedoms articulated through the embodied actions of female dancers in the Ballets Russes and female militant campaigners. It suggests new ways of understanding the suffrage campaign by using theoretical frameworks developed within dance and performance studies to investigate the social construction of the dancing body and the hunger-striking body. Similarly, by focusing on the web of social relationships within Diaghilev’s company, and placing this in the social and political dance history.