Parisians came to blows when The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913.
Igor Stravinsky’s dissonant orchestral score alienated some, Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography saw dancer’s legs turned in and, with great theatrically, the work explored sacrifice, the primitive and sexuality.
So it’s no small undertaking to tackle the revolutionary, influential work, but Ballet BC is doing just that with its season finale — two world premieres inspired by The Rite of Spring with RITE, May 7 to 9 at Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
The original Rite of Spring ends when the woman who’s sacrificed dances herself to death. Emily Molnar, choreographer and artistic director of Ballet BC, has envisioned what comes next.
“It’s kind of this vacuum of time between coming from one place and going to the other,” she said.
RITE will come to life with an otherworldly set designed by Omer Arbel, an internationally renowned Vancouver-based designer who received the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s Allied Arts Medal for 2015, and a composition by Jeremy Schmidt, a member of local psych rock outfit Black Mountain and the man behind the cosmic synthesizer music of Sinoia Caves.
Molnar has created an abstract visual poem in four movements, discarding references to male or female.
“There’s an androgyny in this piece because I just wanted to deal with the sensations one would feel at the moment,” she said.
Like Arbel, Molnar starts her creative process with an idea. She researched the making of The Rite of Spring and the time when it was created in Europe and learned about an art movement called Suprematism. Suprematists wanted to get to pure expression, so Molnar says it was the first time art lovers saw a black box on a white canvas. She’s drawn inspiration from this movement, creating a monochromatic world.
“It’s about getting the body right to true expression,” she said. “I reference, a lot, what we know of the original choreography.”
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