Opera North

For the first time, Opera North collaborates with Leeds-based, internationally-renowned Phoenix Dance Theatre in a new production of a work that revolutionised 20th-century music and dance.

The premiere of The Rite of Spring in Paris on 29 May 1913 was a succès de scandale. Stravinsky wrote in a letter home that ‘things got as far as fighting’, whilst the impresario Serge Diaghilev claimed that the audience’s riotous reaction to the music and – especially – to Nijinsky’s choreography was ‘exactly what I wanted’. Structured in two parts, ‘The Adoration of the Earth’ and ‘The Sacrifice’, the ballet draws on Russian folklore to conjure up a world of primitive religious ceremony, ancestor worship and ritual sacrifice.

Whereas conventional ballet aspired to free dancers from gravity, Nijinsky’s choreography and Stravinsky’s music rooted them in the earth. Stravinsky wedded the shifting metres of Russian folk music to a modernist harmonic language, with stamping bass-lines and off-the-beat accents generating a pulverizing rhythmic energy.