It's the summer of 1913, and Paris is changing. The City of Light is ablaze with art, dance, and cultural revolution. Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes has recently captivated Parisian audiences with Firebird, set to the music of Igor Stravinsky. Their next collaboration, The Rite of Spring featuring the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, is one of the most anticipated productions of the year. On an opening night like no other, The Rite heralded the aesthetic of a new generation, where innovation and tradition collided, and the audience erupted into a riot.

Based on pagan Russian folklore, The Rite depicted a series of ceremonial dances–a community unified by the power and surge from Earth’s spring–culminating in the ritualistic selection of a sacrificial maiden, who dances until her death as an offering to the gods. Her death, like much else, is left unexplained, leaving the audience to contextualize a glimpse of a long-ago land and culture within their modern surroundings. Raw, instinctual, and unrefined, The Rite tells a story of the human struggle against nature’s inexorable ways.

The tale of a virgin sacrifice clashed with Parisian sensibilities, as did the music and choreography. A critic of the time remarked, “There is no, in all of the Rite of Spring, a single line, a single movement of a single character that has the appearance of grace, elegance, lightness, refinement, eloquence, and expression, everything is ugly, heavy-handedly, plainly and consistently ugly.” Stravinsky’s score was riddled with intentional “mistakes,” bringing the orchestra, associated with high society and culture, to a wild and earthy level. Within the first notes of the overture, audience members laughed, and once the performance began in earnest, reactions escalated.

The Parisian elite saw The Rite as a rejection of Western and feminine ideals as they were embodied in European ballet, elevating pagan Slavic aesthetics to an equal standing with European traditional aesthetics. Simply put, The Rite was “not fit” for the grandeur and status of Parisian ballet customs and audiences. There were reports of anything and everything available thrown into the orchestral pit, brawls between audience members, and shouts drowning out the hundred-piece orchestra. Midway through, Stravinsky retreated backstage from the audience as Nijinsky, in the wings, shouted out the counts for the dancers, who could no longer hear the music.

In the following years, the choreography for The Rite was lost until historical reconstruction efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, while the score went on, independent of the choreography, to much acclaim. However, the plot, score, and transgressive nature of The Rite have been the basis of many recreations and interpretations by revolutionary individuals such as Martha Graham, Lester Horton, Mary Wigman, Pina Bausch, and Paul Taylor, as well as institutions such as The Royal Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, English National Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and Kirov Ballet. With each new rendition, artists hope to revitalize conversations, push boundaries, and challenge the audience’s assumptions. Today the original work is revered as a critical piece in the modernist canon, and the practice of revitalizing the production for current audiences is an artistic tradition that defies the transient nature of dance through continual reinvention.

Atlanta Ballet and Claudia Schreier now add their names to the historic list of those reinventing and preserving The Rite of Spring for new audiences, bringing a new and fresh take on a seminal classic this February at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre.

Program Notes written by Margaux Nicolas.

Emily Carrico. Photo by Rachel Neville.