One score, two performances side by side. Since Odile Duboc’s Trois Boléros at Danse à Aix in 1997, the idea that one single work can generate a dance evening with a multiplicity of musicians, choreographers and even dance ensembles has gained currency. To conclude its 2020-2021 season, the Geneva Ballet Company will go full binary by revisiting one of its iconic repertoire pieces and following it with a brash and resolutely contemporary take on one single classic of ballet music: Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
In 1913, Stravinsky unleashed his neopagan paean to Spring on Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and opened the 20th century to music. Fistfights and catcalls hailed the premiere with an audience torn between love and hate for the piece’s frenetic rhythms, unexpected dissonances and swinging dynamics, as well as Vaclav Nijinsky’s avant-gardist choreography. Stravinsky and Nijinsky had imagined a human sacrifice ritual in ancient Russia where a young girl, the Chosen One, is made to dance herself to death.
Andonis Foniadakis edited The Rite of Spring for the Geneva Ballet in 2007, paring the work down to a virtual solo for one woman, the lone victim of the work’s ritual brutality. Six years later, Foniadakis was asked to extend his piece to involve the whole company.
For the second part of the evening, the Geneva Ballet is inviting one of their old acquaintances, Jeroen Verbruggen (Geneva audiences will remember his Nutcracker), to tailor his 2019 Ballet de Monte-Carlo piece Massâcre Anon for them. The brilliant bad boy of Belgian ballet hears a deep vibe in The Rite of Spring, which he mathematically and scenically squares by splitting the music in two parts and dividing them up between the male and the female dancers. For Verbruggen, squares reflect the duality that exists in everything around us, offering a setting and space in which opposites collide and sometimes balance out. When our shameless narcissism identifies weakness and sacrifices it, are we asking our gods to give us back the Spring or are we simply slaking our bitter thirst for massacre?