THE RITA – Raymonda CD

“The Sleeping Beauty engenders a mixed message, riddled with paradoxes, about women.
Its ambivalences are connected as much to social class as to gender.
Its views of female beauty are double-edged: on the one hand, it speaks of women’s beauty as partly consisting of power, intelligence, and agency, while on the other hand, it celebrated the beauty of purely feminine display. – Sally Banes”

For THE RITA, the classical ballet in the last few years has been an epiphany; a massive amalgamation of obsessive and fetishistic elements not unlike earlier interests and themes that have directly provided the structure for abrasive sound found in his past recordings.
Ballet themed recordings of THE RITA from the past two years have concentrated on the single ballerina, the development of the form translated via direct sources – the mic’d thigh, the pointe shoe, the ballet flat on the hardwood floor.
Slowly, heavily directed and building to a ‘crescendo’, the stage was set for the harsh noise contemplation of the multiple female dancers and the eventual stage productions of the turn of the century classical ballet, most notably the projects choreographed by ballet master Marius Petipa.

From the ‘Kingdom of the Shades’ segment of La Bayadere, to the ‘Danse des cygnes’ of Swan Lake, to the ‘Pas de six’ of Sleeping Beauty, Marius Petipa was a master of staging the female form(s) in a time when the tights, pointe shoes and the revealing of the leg and it’s expression via the tutu was prevalent in the classical ballet.
Petipa’s esteemed examples of the art form aside, It’s difficult to not try and contemplate the motives, manner and the direction of the classical ballet and it’s grandiose staging of 50+ female dancers on stage when the ballet was still in the shadow of the ‘ballerina-courtesan’ trade of Vienna and of course the famous ‘foyer de la danse’ at the Paris Opera.

Marius Petipa’s masterpiece of multiple female staging for the THE RITA and these recordings is his ballet RAYMONDA (1898), most notably the ‘Grand pas d’ensemble’ which is a virtual gallery of ballerinas in the classical form, organized and choreographed to exercise beauty in numbers, to highlight the inherent power and grandiose nature of graceful movement in symmetry.
THE RITA’s ‘Raymonda (Stage Arrangement of Women)’ recordings signify the mountainous nature of the aforementioned arrangements via heavily distorted layering of various Raymonda stagings cut into repeatedly with mic’d ballet pointe shoe ribbon and metal chain abuse.
The resulting sound is almost impenetrable, an avalanche of harsh noise that directs the listener back to THE RITA’s CD works such as ‘1000s of Dead Gods’ and ‘Bodies Bare Traces of Carnal Violence’, but this time with the massive study and focus of the staging of the classical ballet.
The material and it’s accompanying booklet and imagery portray the inherent lasting voyeuristic fetishism of abstract female perfection first portrayed by the massively staged ballet works and tendencies of the late 1800s classical ballet ‘Grand pas’ or ‘Ballabile’ and it’s power through movement in symmetry via more contemporary performances.