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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