Le Sacre du Printemps
The first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps took place in Paris 112 years ago this week on May 29, 1913. This groundbreaking ballet with its radical music and choreography by Igor Stravinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky, caused the biggest scandal in dance history.
Imagine those early 20th century Parisians heading to the world premiere of a ballet by renowned composer Stravinsky who had already written their beloved Firebird, expecting elegant classical ballet-style en-pointe, only to be presented with such an unexpectedly contemporary and jarring composition.
No wonder there was a riot.
Contemporary accounts describe the audience as being appalled, with people laughing, booing, hissing, and even imitating animal noises almost from the start of the performance. The uproar escalated into fistfights, with some even throwing objects at the stage.
The noise from the audience was such that the dancers couldn’t hear the orchestra and instead followed Nijinsky who was standing on a chair in the wings, clapping out the beats. The conductor gave up. Stravinsky compained that the dance had little connection to the music, because the dancers followed Nijinsky’s beat rather than the music itself. The dancers, and Nijinsky, kept going to the end and The Rite of Spring has survived to inspire several generations of choreographers and dancers.
There have been many versions of The Rite of Spring over the years – Pina Bausch, Mats Ek, many others – but this is the closest I’ve seen to the original Nijinsky choreography and intent, Robert Joffrey’s ‘restaging’ for the company that bears his name in 1987.
Watching it today, in 2025, it’s still radical and shocking. Its repetitive beats, the dancers’ unison and unusual movements, the inexorable patterns of the dance, Beatriz Rodriguez as the Chosen One, so still, so terrified, trembling with fear amid all that frantic action, are striking still. And the brutality of the sacrifice is still shocking even now, 112 years since audiences first saw it.
The post Ruth Leon recommends…… The Rite of Spring – Joffrey Ballet appeared first on Slippedisc.
