“Nothing ever written about the riots during the premiere of The Rite of Spring conveys even in the slightest what actually occurred. The theater appeared to have experienced an earthquake. It seemed to be shaking. People shouted insults, booed and whistled, drowning out the music. People punched each other. There are no words to describe the scene.” Valentine Gross-Hugo, one of the theater critics of The Rite of Spring’s Paris premiere on the 29th of May 1913, clearly was shaken by the events of that evening. Though a supporter of the revolutionary piece, she was still unable to know that Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography set to Igor Stravinsky’s music was not only going to become one of the biggest theater scandals in history but also one of the most influential pieces of the 20th century.

After The Rite of Spring’s century-long history of performances, after countless choreographic interpretations and attempts to reconstruct the original choreography, Cayetano Soto is now concerned with a reinterpretation of Stravinsky’s musically developed theme of pagan human sacrifice. Stravinsky wrote about his composition: “When I wrote the last pages of The Firebird in St. Petersburg I was overcome one day, completely unexpected, as I was preoccupied with other things, of the vision of a large pagan ceremony: old wise men sitting in a circle and watching the death dance of a young girl, who was going to be sacrificed to appease the god of spring. That was the theme of The Rite of Spring.”

Soto’s new interpretation purposefully omits the spring ritual motive and the prehistoric Russian setting. Mythical creatures like pagan priests, wise old men or pure virgins whose deaths were to appease the gods, are of less interest to him than the contemporary meaning and relevance of the theme of sacrifice. However, Soto simultaneously respects the structure Stravinsky gave his composition. The Rite of Spring has two parts, “The Adoration of the Earth” and “The Sacrifice”, each consisting of an introduction and several short movements. His choreography portrays these parts through dance as well as through a sophisticated lighting concept, especially in the second part which, in the original version, takes place during the night.

The first part consists of an increasingly threatening crisis situation and growing aggression, also indicated by the set design in the beginning of the piece. Individuals and couples break out of formation and form various fronts. Territories are marked and moved. The tension rises and culminates in the confrontation between three rivaling groups. The second part consists of the search for the scapegoat, whose sacrifice signifies a decaying society’s hope to reinstate its unity. But Soto exposes this archaic, mythical path to self-cleansing as an illusion, a projection of colonial ethnology of the early 20th century. In a complex modern world, which no longer possesses a clear reference to god, it is not only the efficacy of the role of sacrifice, but also the traditional attribution of this role to certain individuals which has become more and more unsure: Today, nearly anyone can become a victim, the social contexts of sacrifice are endless – family, work, church, politics, wars etc. – and yet there is no certainty of absolution anymore.
This hopeless drama without any possibility of catharsis, which threatens to run hot with constantly changing roles set to Stravinsky’s stirring music, demands a language of movement with a strong dynamic. Soto’s dance is built upon a classical basis, which often gets modified by flexed and inward turning feet. The dancers’ upper bodies, mostly static in classical ballet, are carrying out wave like motions. Particularly the Pas de Deux are technically demanding and require the dancers to give their all, as they command fast and unusual, sometimes almost acrobatic movements. The dancers remain in the plié often, however, and jumps almost never occur, giving the dance an air of being firmly rooted on the ground despite its dynamic movements.
Soto’s Rite of Spring does not insist on a certain individual being the chosen victim. Instead, various actors, men and women in identical costumes, are marked as possible victims in changing situations. They can be recognized by their universally understandable posture and gestures: their wide-open and raised arms are defenseless, their lowered head emphasizes humiliation, vulnerability and fragility. A paper bag over the head provokes ridicule and mockery and symbolizes the coxcomb, the headdress of a person sentenced to death or the crown of thorns. Whether in fact a sacrifice will take place at the end of this performance of The Rite of Spring is left open for interpretation. Rather, it has to remain open, since for modern society there is no redemption outside of itself.

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photographer: Ricardo Brito

After a century-long history of performances of “Sacre du Printemps”, after countless choreographic interpretations of the pagan human sacrifice, after one of the biggest theatre scandals of the 20th century and several attempts at reconstructing the original choreography, Cayetano Soto’s desire is to reinterpret Stravinsky’s composition along with the topic of human sacrifice. Today, it is rather obvious that maintaining the phantasma of a society’s self-cleansing through the sacrifice of a scapegoat is no longer possible. The flourishing ethnology, which emerged during colonial times in the early 20th century, projected these cleansing mechanisms onto archaic societies thereby overlooking the fact that reality in a secularized modern world is much more complicated. In Soto’s eyes society disintegrates and divides itself into groups of rivals that indeed do select numerous victims, but are not aware anymore in how far these sacrifices have a redemptive effect.
Nadja Kadel

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