The Rite of Spring/common ground(s) Review

From Russia via Paris, to Germany and now West Africa, Stravinsky’s extraordinary The Rite of Spring retains the power to punch you in the gut again and again. And the company of African dancers assembled by the École des Sables in Senegal bring something new and exhilarating to its performance now at Sadler’s Wells.

Stravinsky’s piece is a powerful depiction of the sudden explosion of spring in his native Russia. Shrill brass and pounding percussion alternate with gentle flutes to portray nature at its most indomitable and people’s ancestral ways of living with it, including fertility rites and human sacrifice.

Though it shocked Paris audiences when it premiered in 1913 (they’d never heard music quite like that), The Rite of Spring has since proved irresistible to all manner of choreographers; but nobody has captured its savage, elemental essence quite like the late German Pina Bausch.

Notoriously reluctant to issue licences to perform, the Pina Bausch Foundation was persuaded to do so to École des Sables in collaboration with Sadler’s Wells.The result is a re-energised performance, during which I forgot to breathe on several occasions, even though I had seen it when it was first performed at Sadler’s Wells two years ago.

Bausch’s 1975 The Rite of Spring is danced on a stage covered in peat, and as it goes on so the dancers become more and more earth-stained, the women’s light coloured shifts losing their pristine appearance, the earth blending with sweat on the men’s naked torsos.

We see the women first: one by one they run onto the stage, vulnerable, fearful, their every moment filled with premonition.They seek each other’s protection, yet know there is no escaping what’s to come.

When the men come on they bring a shock of dominant muscular masculinity. The interactions between the two groups become a push-pull of attraction-repulsion, leading to a frenzied fertility rite, bodies clashing together in ferocious couplings.

And then one man chooses one young woman the dance herself to death. The Chosen Maiden submits, he dresses her with a symbolic red tunic, and she dances, not with grace but with despair, her frantic movements jerky, falling and rising again and again until she falls one last time and the lights go out.

The Rite of Spring is very much a collective work, but the climactic role of The Chosen Maiden is key and Manuella Hermine Kouassi gave a mesmerising, breath-taking performance.

The double bill opens with common ground(s) a two-hander for Germaine Acogny, founder of École des Sables and known as ‘the mother of contemporary African dance’ and the French dancer and choreographer Malou Airaudo, formerly a member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal.

They were instrumental in bringing The Rite of Spring to Africa, and their duet is a gentle paean to a friendship between two women with long lives behind them – slow moving, full of tenderness and humour, like an intimate conversation we should really not intrude into.

Note: the performances of The Rite of Spring on the main stage are complemented by a powerful sound installation in the Lilian Baylis Studio, running at various times on Sunday 10 November. Full details and tickets here