THE RITE OF SPRING: THE REDISCOVERED WORK

The premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps at the Champs-Elysées Theater, on the 29th of May 1913, became famous due to a hostile reaction coming from the most conservative audience, out bursting in real episodes of fighting. This reaction seems to have been caused by the boldness of Nijinsky's provocative choreography for the Ballets Russes, than by the nature also innovative Stravinsky’s score, which perhaps the Parisian audience might not have understood in its real dimension, due to the surprise it constituted. The Sacre is, indeed, a revolutionary work, with its extreme dissonances challenging the canons of the traditional tonal system, its rhythms and irregular metric accents, its savage energy. Almost 100 years later, after having influenced the entire 20th-century music, the work still lead us to a rejoicing feeling of novelty, fracture and discovery of new continents.

In The Rite of Spring, Vaslav Nijinsky used a language of radical movement regarding the formalities of classical dance, transforming the dancer's body on expressive matter. Our aim is to assess, on the one hand, what were the factors that contributed to the construction of one of the 20th-century major works of the choreographic legacy and, on the other hand, what are the repercussions of this creation nowadays.