Above: Martha Graham's RITE OF SPRING, rehearsal photo by Jade Young. Click on the image to enlarge.
Thursday April 18, 2013 - Dance companies around the world are honoring the 100th anniversary of the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's RITE OF SPRING with performances of works set to the score - music which, along with the radical choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, provoked a scandalous reaction from the crowd at the first night in Paris.
Martha Graham's rendering of the Stravinsky masterpiece premiered at the New York State Theatre in 1984 and was a huge success. The ballet has not been seen since 1993; now the Company have revived RITE in honor of its 100th birthday. It will be performed at Chapel Hill, North Carolina on April 26th and 27th, 2013. Details here.
In October 2012, photographer Jade Young and I were at the Graham studios when RITE was on the rehearsal schedule. The portions of the work we saw that day certainly whetted the appetite, but even with this sampling in mind, I was not prepared for the incredible impact of tonight's showing of the entire ballet for an invited audience at the Company's Westbeth space. It was simply one of the greatest experiences in my dance-filled life.
Martha Graham's RITE OF SPRING is both a dazzling vision of the music and an ultra-demanding, Olympian race for the dancers. The Company, augmented by extra dancers to fill out the ensembles, continually left me breathless with the power and athleticism of their dancing. The work is a structural marvel to begin with, one that demands unfettered physicality and uncanny stamina. The Graham men - extraordinary gods of dance - simply flung themselves into the endless leaps and fast-paced partnering motifs whilst the radiant sisterhood of women weave about the space with abounding energy and grace, arms and hands speaking to us in a stylized dialect that is at once ancient and vividly present.
Tadej Brdnik and Maurizio Nardi are the acolytes and Ben Schultz the high priest of this lost tribe who have loomed up out of legend, dancing to this hymn-to-Nature score. Ben, clothed at first in a long cape, eventually reveals his marvelously inked torso; in both stature and movement, he creates a center for the work as the ritual presses forward to its inexorable climax.
At first Blakeley White-McGuire is just one among the innocent maidens; though her dancing inevitably stands out - because she's Blakeley - we don't immediately realize what fate has in store for her. Once she has been chosen, the trajectory of the work carries her on a cataclysmic journey towards death: a sacrificial act of which she is fully aware. In the final twenty minutes of Graham's RITE OF SPRING, Blakeley seemed to transcend the music and the choreography with her uncanny wedding of physical prowess to emotional vulnerability. This was a revelatory performance, one which the audience and her fellow dancers saluted with heartfelt applause as Blakeley took her bows at the end.
Sets? Costumes? Lighting? Yes, I feel certain they will all enhance this ballet when its performed here in Gotham during the next Graham season - it will be a red-letter date for sure. But tonight, in practice clothes and in the unvarnished simplicity of the studio space, Martha Graham's RITE OF SPRING already speaks to us in all its power, passion and mystery.
Watch a BBC film RIOT AT THE RITE here.