Lost Time

The Biennale offered an intimate view of artistic creation, with pioneering choreographer Molissa Fenley among the artists featured in this year’s programme. Her “State of Darkness,” the celebrated solo set to Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” was performed by Vienna State Ballet principal Cassandra Trenary. Fenley herself also returned to the stage in “Bardo.” Together, the two performances brought different generations and moments in dance history into the same frame, resonating with the festival’s theme, Time Does Not Exist.

Performance

Molissa Fenley: “State of Darkness” and “Bardo”

Place

Biennale Danza, Venice, Italy, July 31, 2026

Words

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Cassandra Trenary in “State of Darkness” by Melissa Fenley. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

In an open conversation with director Wayne McGregor, Fenley discussed the ideas and creative process behind “State of Darkness.” The story begins in Paris in 1913, when Stravinsky’s score and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for the Ballets Russes provoked one of the most notorious scandals in dance history. The score’s violent rhythms and the ballet’s unsettling theme centred on the sacrifice of a virgin for propitious agrarian ends. Nijinsky's choreography gradually disappeared from the stage. Decades later, dance historians Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer painstakingly reconstructed it for the Joffrey Ballet from photographs, drawings, annotated scores and other surviving traces.

Seeing that reconstruction in 1987 prompted Fenley to create “State of Darkness.” She stripped away its narrative, ritual and Slavic associations, entrusting the immense force of Stravinsky’s orchestration to a single performer: herself. As Fenley explained, the title refers to the opening pages of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, and to the disorienting yet soothing darkness of partial awakening. It is a striking coincidence that the novel was also published in 1913, the year in which “The Rite of Spring” premiered.

Hearing Molissa Fenley speak about the work today, one can still feel her instinctive response to Stravinsky’s score. Before choreographing the solo, she would listen to it during her warm-ups until she felt as though an external force were entering her body. From inspiration and creation to transmission and performance, the work seems driven by a visceral encounter between music and body. Fenley recalled the approval of the three male dancers she admired most for venturing into such a complex, monumental score: Vaslav Nijinsky appeared to her in a dream, while Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov approved the work in real life.

Cassandra Trenary in “State of Darkness” by Melissa Fenley. Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Particularly compelling was the discussion between Molissa Fenley and Cassandra Trenary about the transmission of the piece. Technology entered directly into the process as they began working together over Zoom during lockdown, while Elliot Caplan’s documentary State of Darkness Part Four (2024) explores a further chapter in the work’s life and its archival and artistic legacy. Known for his innovative video collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage in the 1980s, Caplan pays close attention to the exchanges between the two artists, their onomatopoeic language and their almost magical mutual understanding, as well as to the breathlessness, sweat and exhaustion produced by the choreography’s relentless physical demands.

In a plain pale-blue studio, Molissa Fenley and Cassandra Trenary return to a recording of Fenley performing the solo in 1990. They refer to the figure on screen as “she,” as though the choreography existed as an external presence. Through Caplan’s camera, we watch the two women watching the earlier recording, creating a subtle game of mirrors. Wearing a Nico T-shirt, Trenary absorbs the steps. Deliberately or not, the room, the clothes and the atmosphere, together with Caplan’s fixed camera and infrequent changes of angle, evoke a distinctly American culture of experimentation and the New York avant-garde. Choreographer and interpreter appear remarkably attuned to one another and to the music, until Trenary begins to resemble a strange double of Fenley. The rehearsals culminate in Fenley’s declaration, “I think you’re ready,” followed by warm praise for Trenary’s technical solidity.

Seen live, “State of Darkness,” set to Antal Doráti’s recording of Stravinsky’s score, becomes an extraordinary test of stamina and mental fortitude. Trenary first appears within a warm circle of reddish light, which gradually shifts into deep, saturated colours. Her movements adhere to, or anticipate, the music: bursts of acceleration give way to sudden restraint, before gathering force and erupting again. The choreography hovers between the feral and the mechanical, combining something archaic and almost shamanic with exacting physical precision. As Fenley explained in the post-show conversation with critic Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, the stage is divided into imaginary territories associated with figures or conditions such as ancestors, rejuvenation and warriors. Above all, it is an extraordinary tour de force, and Trenary’s performance was met with an enthusiastic reception and a standing ovation.

Molissa Fenley in “Bardo.” Photograph by Andrea Avezzù, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

Ironically, although Fenley has consistently rejected the sacrificial narrative traditionally associated with “The Rite of Spring,” the choreography seems unable to escape its gravitational pull. By following Stravinsky’s score with such feral, instinctive and almost unreflective intensity, the work gradually produces an image perilously close to sacrifice: a solitary body driven to the limits of endurance, exposed and consumed by the dance itself. Seeing Trenary exhausted at the end, one is led to wonder whether the work would be any less effective or convincing today with her chest covered.

“State of Darkness” was followed by “Bardo,” a solo performed by Molissa Fenley in an elegant white corset and trousers. Its title refers to the Bardo Thödol, known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and to the intermediate state between death and rebirth, during which consciousness confronts the consequences of its karma and the possibility of liberation. Somei Satoh’s “Mantra” fills the space with a continuous vibration, drawing the audience into an inward landscape. Fenley moves with extraordinary precision and commanding presence. Through deep pliés and gestures with outstretched arms, she sustains an almost impossible stillness, revealing the magnetic authority and interpretive depth that have long distinguished her dancing.

“Bardo” returns us to a distant moment in American artistic history. Created in memory of Keith Haring, it premiered at his memorial service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on 4 May 1990, following his death from AIDS. The work is a moving farewell to Haring and to an artistic friendship that had begun in 1978 with their collaborative video, Video Clones. The performance feels like an ode to a bygone American era, offering a nostalgic glimpse of a world defined by artistic freedom, bold creative encounters and a sense of infinite possibility.

By the end of the evening, the entire programme, though aesthetically stunning and utterly refreshing, had come to feel like an extended flashback. “State of Darkness,” without the historical context that once made a solitary body taking on Stravinsky’s monumental score appear heroic and disruptive, risks being perceived primarily as a feat of endurance. “Bardo” retains the solemnity and emotional force of a deeply felt farewell, though its use of Tibetan spiritual imagery may today appear touched by a certain spiritual exoticism. Perhaps time does exist after all.

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti

Elsa Giovanna Simonetti is a Paris-based philosopher researching ancient thought, divination, and practices of salvation at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With over a decade of ballet training, she studied History of Dance as part of her Philosophy and Aesthetics degree at the University of Bologna. Alongside her academic work, she writes about dance.

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