(Sarah Crompton’s article appeared in the Guardian, 2/12/23; Photo: ‘I think you must do it just by feel’: Dada Masilo’s interpretation of The Rite of Spring, based on the traditional dance of Botswana, has its UK premiere later this month. Photograph: John Hogg.)
Stravinsky’s ballet sensation of 1913 shocked its first Paris audience. More than 150 versions later, the far-reaching pull of this modernist masterpiece remains irresistible…
For a work that changed the course of dance, introducing a blast of modernism into a conventional art form, Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring had a surprisingly short shelf life. Despite more than 130 fraught and complicated rehearsals as the dancers struggled to get to grips with the stylised steps and Stravinsky’s radical rhythms, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes performed it only 10 times before consigning it to the history books.
Even the famous riot that greeted its premiere in Paris on 29 May 1913 is a subject of some dispute. In his new book, Diaghilev’s Empire, Rupert Christiansen says that there are more than 100 accounts of the events of that night and they are “wildly at variance and even downright contradictory… Some scarcely dwell on the hubbub.”
But what is without doubt is that from the second the soaring bassoon starts to play the melody that marks the opening, the music has propelled itself into the heart of western culture, its searing power undimmed by time. I heard Stravinsky’s score and read about Nijinsky’s Rite long before I saw any version of the ballet, poring over descriptions of its creation – where a young Marie Rambert was recruited to help with the counts and then quietly fell in love with its creator – and looking at photographs of the dancers in poses with turned-in legs and uncomfortable felt costumes.
The first production I ever saw was Kenneth MacMillan’s at the Royal Ballet, made in 1962 and slightly dated now, with its Sidney Nolan designs and dancers in long matted wigs and pointe shoes, like predatory insects.
The music never fails to thrill, but the ultimate fascination of Rite is just how wide-reaching its inspiration has been: two new versions, one by the South African choreographer Dada Masilo, the other by the British dance-maker Seeta Patel, are about to tour the UK. Both have their roots far outside western ballet and now take their place alongside more than 150 danced versions of the Rite already in existence, dating back to 1920 when Léonide Massine made one to replace Nijinsky’s original.
That Rite’s US premiere in 1930 starred a young Martha Graham, who went on to create her own version at the age of 90. The American choreographer Lester Horton switched the action to the wild west; the pioneering Mary Wigman and the dramatic Maurice Béjart emphasised the erotic qualities of a piece that culminates in a virgin dancing herself to death. Michael Clark’s Mmm… added music by the Sex Pistols and Stephen Sondheim and featured his mother giving birth to him on stage.
The majority, though, follow the pattern mapped out by Stravinsky in collaboration with the Russian mystic and expert on folk rituals Nicholas Roerich, who conceived the work as a pagan rite in which a tribe of elders welcome the spring by sacrificing a chosen maiden to guarantee the earth’s continued fertility. The score is divided into sections with titles such as Procession of the Sage and Glorification of the Chosen One.
Perhaps the most influential modern version was made in 1975 by the dance theatre pioneer Pina Bausch. Performed on an earth-covered floor, it emphasises the patriarchal, animalistic nature of the ritual, portraying a terrified young woman sacrificed to appease the misogyny of the male elders. A touring production of Bausch’s piece, performed by a specially created company of dancers recruited from 14 African countries, was one of the three versions of Rite seen at London’s Sadler’s Wells theatre last year. (Dancing at Dusk, a film capturing its creation in Senegal in the middle of Covid returns to Sadler’s Wells’s Digital Stage this month.)
This was followed by the distinguished Swedish choreographer Mats Ek’s re-envisioning for English National Ballet that staged Rite as an intimate family drama, with an arranged marriage as its theme. Finally, the flamenco dancer Israel Galván performed a devastating solo flamenco interpretation that seemed to hold a conversation with the splintering complexities of Stravinsky’s score. Both are choreographers who are finding new ways to interpret the music and the narrative arc. “I wanted to tell the story in a way that makes it mine, in the way I read the music,” Ek told me at the time. “The music is my guidance, and I have to have my own meeting with it.”
