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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Once again, a choreographer has taken on "The Rite of Spring"--Doug Varone, for the Metropolitan Opera's "Stravinsky" program--and once again the result is a trifling business compared with that epochal piece of music. Though Stravinsky composed "The Rite" as a ballet score--for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, in 1913, with Vaslav Nijinsky as the choreographer--dance-makers have reason to run like mad from it. Its rhythms are famously volatile: a sort of sonic rock fight, just what dancers don't need. And even if that were to seem an interesting challenge, a less interesting one is the ballet's intrinsic primitivism. The original production had to do with a tribe of prehistoric Slavs greeting spring. In Act I, these folk engage in auguries and games. Their Sage comes forth, and he kisses the earth. In Act II, to thank their god for renewing the fertility of the soil, the people offer him a sacrifice. A girl is selected, the so-called Chosen One, and in an ecstasy of terror, with the whole tribe watching, she dances herself to death.
This is a forthrightly brutal story, one that says life is food, sex, and death. And it was for that civilization-exploding message that "The Rite of Spring" was celebrated (and execrated) at its premiere. "This is a biological ballet," Jacques Riviere wrote. The dancers looked to him like "large revolving masses of protoplasm; germ layers, . . . placentas"--in other words, cells, driven solely by biological imperatives. Thanks to Darwin and Freud, this law-of-the-jungle theme was frequently sounded in Europe's vanguard art in the years before the First World War, but the purest example was "The Rite."...
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