Three different versions of The Rite of Spring -- a performance of Millicent Hodson's reconstruction of Nijinsky's original choreography, a contemporary version by Emanuel Gat that premiered in 2004, and Maurice Béjart's version that premiered in 1958. The company, the Polish National Ballet, was excellent, and the programme was well conceived and fascinating. It was inspiring to see, as well as extremely interesting. The angular movement, the Primitivism, yeah. The celebrated rioting at the premiere wasn't caused by the music, it was the choreography and design. The Primitivst elements are very much of their era, but the movement seems very contemporary. It was like I was both watching a piece of history, one of those moments where everything changed, and seeing how near we are to it..
Gat's revisioning was very interesting, but it didn't fully work. The piece used only five dancers -- two men and three women. The men were in tightly tailored shirts and trousers, the women in Little Black Dresses. The set, rather than the lavish, pastel colored backdrop paintings, was plain with the stage mostly dark, lighting focused on a red rug on the middle of the stage. The five dancers interwove with each other, in ballroom dance-inspired movement, changing partners in an updated, urban, "civilized" mating ritual. It was ingenious at times, and sometimes the contrast of simple walking or sinuous movements with Stravinsky's rhythms gave an extra sinister level to the movement. But, it didn't go beyond that and the concept ended up falling flat without a movement from the fertility ritual to the violence or any culmination. There was no separation between the two acts, and the movement continued without any resolution. Maybe that was the point -- that modern rituals are lacking in life-force -- but as much as I wanted the concept to work as a whole, it felt forced and too small. Maybe adding dancers and building could have helped. Again, though, the dancing was excellent.
(YouTube video is of Gat's choreography, not the production I saw.)
And then there was Béjart's version. Unlike Gat's it took the themes and concepts in the original, abstracted them, and made them more universal. Successfully. And completely musically. And it added more in the way of gender commentary. The two acts were separated, with the first act all men, the second act women. The tribal rituals of a society, in which solidarity and dominance are asserted by choosing a scapegoat who fails to completely fit in in the gender play, ostracizing them, and making sure that mating happens between approved members . . . yeah. In the simple costumes of various colors (leotards for women, unitards for men, the scapegoats in white), it was clear that this isn't just "Primitive" ritual, this is the way society is still working today. The same movements of human sacrifice to keep the tribe under control, with whatever reasons or beliefs behind that . . . and it worked so well with the music. The only distraction from the work of art as a whole, was that the female scapegoat was so thin she was almost skeletal. And ye gods, seeing twenty-two excellent male dancers on stage together in choreography of that power and depth is something special. From what I saw, the company focus less on "star" quality than on a troupe that works as a single body. This may be due to the more ensemble nature of the works we saw rather than the company itself, but it seemed like everyone was soloist quality and everyone was on equal ground with little difference between corps and soloists other than who was dancing.
