East meets West in sensational style

Rite of Spring (Festival Theatre, Edinburgh) Verdict: Sacred sacrifice ★★★★★

WHEN Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris in 1913, it caused a sensation. In fact, it caused a riot on the Champs-Elysees, due to its extremely avant-garde music and the ‘challenging’ choreography, by Nijinsky himself.

Today, riots are more the province of football crowds than theatre audiences. But Rite of Spring can still cause a sensation.

In the last big dance production of the 2019 Edinburgh International Festival, director and choreographer Yang Liping’s Peacock Contemporary Dance Company took the original Russian concept and transported it to China. What had been conceived more than a century ago as a pagan Slavic paean was imbued with Eastern aesthetics, wisdom and philosophy. For Eastern, read Buddhist, particularly Tibetan Buddhist, which is interesting, especially as this production is approved and sponsored by the People’s Republic. From an artistic point of view, it is gloriously and visually stunning. Cast members, pictured, are on stage even before the audience arrives. Once it starts, it gets better and better. The predominantly female dancers bring a succession of vividly colourful images to life as they appear to transform into birds and fans. A glorious moment comes when a row of dancers is fixed to the floor by their ankles, producing a weaving, waving, shimmering life form or force. Dressed in aquamarine, when they raise hands with long green fingernails above their gently swaying heads, they are for all the world like a row of iridescent sea anemones on a subterranean coral reef.

Amid the beauty is a serious purpose, however, as the time for the spring sacrifice approaches. As the female protagonist offers herself, the moment of regeneration and reincarnation is marked in quiet glory as a shower of golden dust falls from the heavens upon her. It is a truly glorious image.

In the programme, the dancers were simply named in a list of performers, in true Chinese egalitarian style. So it is difficult to single out individuals for praise. Collectively, it was a superb ensemble performance.

It can only be a good thing for artistic expression in China – particularly when it is a contemporary dance company led by a prominent figure from the minority Bai community, showing that a sacred sacrifice can be reinfluenced by the East and brought back so gloriously to the West.