Rite(s) of Spring

Last weekend a friend and I took our children to see Ballet West's reboot of Rite of Spring. It was a little different from any other production I have seen and it might have been a lot less full of hokum than the more literalistic, narrative treatments had the costumers not decided to put all of the dancers into vaguely Star-Trekish spandex. The post-industrial set felt a little "cutting edge opera production of the early 90s" to me as well, but the dancing was stellar, including the young boy who played what might have been "the Chosen One," but might also have been a young deity, an acolyte, or any number of other ritual actors.

At the very end, much to the delight of my offspring, the large copper disk hanging at the back of the stage that I thought was meant to be some kind of prehistoric sun deity turned into a basin, and rain from on high filled it up. Then, as the score crashed to the close of the Sacrificial Dance, the boy and his female shadow or double were both deluged by this water as the basin tipped back to the vertical. Cool effect. Wet stage, wet spandex.

Though the staging was a little too Cirque-de-Soleil-esque and not quite reflective enough for my taste, I did like the choreography, for the most part (Nicolo Fonte), and the company just keeps getting better, especially the male dancers, the newer generation of whom are far more technically adept than their forerunners. I think that if Adam Sklute can just trust his company's skills to carry them a little bit more and resist the urge to play to the middlebrow, BW could change the whole culture of dance performance in the region and maybe open up the possibility of more experimental dance finding an audience.

The non-narrative, non-literal treatment of the Rite was refreshing, and it helped focus attention on the music, which is still sharp and astringent after more than a century. The rites of spring -- graduation, end-of-year ballet recital, final parent-teacher conferences, and of course, the impending pilgrimage to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies -- are on my mind, of course, and the music, with its counterpoint of tenderness, abandon, and foreboding, seemed particularly in tune with my mood.

When I began writing this entry I thought I would have something more profound to say about the ballet, or about spring, or about these annual rituals. But perhaps because it is also the week in which the end-of-semester rituals are a bit attenuated for me (I am not giving any exams, and I have already finished grading), I am inclined only to observe, and not to pontificate. It's just as well.