Arts & Events

Back in 1975, as Director of Tanztheater Wuppertal in Germany, Pina Bausch created her visionary choreography of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du Printemps or Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had premiered in Paris in 1913 and had evoked a scandalous response from audiences unprepared to accept its unrelenting rhythmic insistence and dissonance. Stravinsky had fashioned this work based on Russian folk traditions of primitive rituals involving human sacrifice. 

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring features a group of young maidens, one of whom is chosen by fate to be a sacrificial victim who dances to her sheer exhaustion and death. 

Pina Bausch died in 2009 at age 69, but her son, Salomon Bausch, who heads the Pina Bausch Foundation, wished to keep Pina Bausch’s legacy alive and current, so he organised a co-production between the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables in Senegal, and Sadler’s Wells in London to present Pina Bausch’s choreography of Rite of Spring using dancers recruited from 14 African countries. This ground-breaking production came to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on February 16-18 under the auspices of Cal Performances. I attended the matinee performance at 3:00 PM on Sunday, 2/18. 

As someone who had lived and worked in Africa for two years in the early 1960s and had since returned there for a monthlong visit in 1993, I found Pina Bausch’s choreography of Rite of Spring absolutely riveting. It involved the best of modern dance with elements of traditional African dance in an explosive combination that was enormously powerful. Never before have I seen such amazing ensemble dancing from two groups of dancers, 16 women and 16 men. And the ensemble dancing was often mirrored in agitated, even acrobatic, solo dances for various protagonists who performed on a stage covered with earthy peat.  

Interestingly, Pina Bausch had streamlined the basic plot of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, simplifying it by eliminating any age differential among the female and male dancers. Absent from this production were an old woman fortune-teller, a council of elderly men, and an elderly male sage. 

Instead, the male dancers, who were all bare-chested, were approximately the same age as the female dancers, who were clad in white. When fate singles out one young woman as The Chosen One, she dons an orange sheath before dancing herself to death before an onlooking group of young men and women. The Chosen One’s dance of death was immensely powerful, and the work comes to a sudden close when she falls to the ground, utterly exhausted, to her death. 

There is more than a suggestion of misogyny in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring as the male dancers seem to guide and control the female dancers, although, as mentioned above, there is here no age differential which places responsibility for the misogyny on elderly men. Here it is simply men in general who are responsible for the sacrifice of a young maiden. 

There was, alas, another work on the program, an opening piece for two female dancers entitled Common Ground(s). It was danced and choreographed by veterans Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo. The less said about this piece the better, for it was in my opinion utterly empty, involving only gratuitous posturing with no meaning whatsoever. It’s a pity that the worst of modern dance in this piece shared a double bill with the very best of modern dance in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring.