LET YOURSELF GO.('The Rite of Spring')(Dance Review)

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 ...