Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring is one of the most influential musical and choreographic works of the 20^thcentury. The piece depicts a Russian pagan mystery-rite, which invokes the mythic cycle of death and re-birth, and celebrates the creative powers of the Spring.

      Dancers from Diagheliv's Production of Stravinsky and Nijinsky's Sacré du Printemps (1913)

The Rite of Spring is a ballet and orchestral concert work by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. It was written for the 1913 season of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes company, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinski and stage designs and costumes by Nicholas Roerich. When the ballet was first performed on 29 May 1913, the avant-garde nature of the music and the choreography caused a near-riot in the audience.

The Rite of Spring is recognized as one of the most influential musical works of the 20^thcentury. Stravinsky has described The Rite of Spring as "a musical-choreographic work, [representing] pagan Russia ... unified by a single idea: the mystery and great surge of the creative power of Spring". (Van den Toorn, pp.26-27) The work has no specific plot or narrative, but should be considered as a succession of choreographed episodes. 

I discuss the innovations of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Chapter 2 of my thesis on Dance on Screen, in a sub-chapter titled: "The Primal Act of Performance". I refer in particular to Diaghilev's ballet Parade (1917):

"Parade became a landmark in the history of performing arts, promoting the modern tendency to cross the boundaries which artificially divide art forms into strict categories, encouraging artists to break the limits of their media through collaboration with other artists and to engage in a process of synthesis of different art forms and disciplines. In addition, Parade constituted a text, including the performance of ballet, acrobatics, sculpture, a collage of sound and music, and the comic assimilation of absurd events typical of surrealism, and Cocteau's vision of a 'new mixed media genre' (Goldberg, 1988:81). According to Goldberg, Parade set the tone for the performance of the post-war years (Ibid., p. 77). Clarke and Crisp imply that 'to Parade can be traced a number of today's so-called innovations in music, design and choreography' (1992: 117)". (Dance on Screen, p.19)