The Rite of Spring:

Choreography by Pina Bausch 
Composed by Igor Stravinsky 

common ground[s]:

Choreogrphed and Performed by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo
Composed by Fabrice Bouillon LaForest 

Forty-five years ago, Pina Bauch’s The Rite of Spring took a central place with its UK premiere at the Edinburgh Internal Festival. Revived – the piece has a companion performance preceding it, common ground[s], created by the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables in Senegal, and Sadler’s Wells. Now though, more than thirty dancers come together from fourteen African nations to aid in this inspired project of duality which thunders with a blistering power – a raw, primal, and yet wholly gentile and feather-light control of form and shape.

Transforming the Playhouse stage into the scorched earth of the rising sun which mingles into orange under a canopy of azure, two silhouetted women drift onto the stage. Aethereal and enticing, this introductory piece has been created and performed by the marvel of contemporary African dance, Senegalese choreographer Germaine Acogny and long-time Bausch collaborator Malou Airaudo. Rhythmic, the movement weaves from soft and gentile to staunch with authority, the pair often mirroring or building from one another. Their connection is sisterly, maternal, bordering on a lingering longing they don’t receive from others – it’s a stark contrast to the brutality which is about to unfold.

This is no longer the callous frost of Igor Stravinsky’s Russian wasteland or the lush greenery, but apocalyptic intensities of Walt Disney’s Fantasia – here Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables and Sadler’s Wells pluck away with the ingrained patriarchal control of a tribal community. The pair also lacerate any notions of the obsessive push for younger and younger performers, as this glorious celebration of older generations of dancers ties together a marvellous respect and appreciation for heritage and a woman’s prevailing strength.

If possible, skip your interval drink and appreciate the magnitude of work involved with the transition into Rite of Spring, the stagehands and design of the production as imperative an aspect as the movement itself. Cartons of earth spill across the Playhouse space, threaded and ploughed ready for the second act.

Tension erupts almost immediately – even for those unfamiliar with the work: as an ensemble of men and women grind their heels into the dirt, the status of a victim arises among the shifting movements. Where the traditional finds a young girl pushed into dancing herself to death, Bauch toys with perspective and holds our gaze into the dirt: this story is from the victim’s perspective, not that of the perpetrator looking onward, detached.

Chosen as the sacrifice, Dovi Afi Anique Ayiboe’s solo is, frankly, harrowing. Dressed in a pink/red slip dress, the pulsating dread thrashes throughout the venue, right to the back of the theatre captivating – but not with glee, with discomfort and appreciation, you’re unable to break your gaze away.

Surrounding them, hungry, swaggering, the ensemble of men present a persistently aggressive stance as they flitter between movements of fluid jazz, ballet and contemporary and innovative movement. The earth shaken and ground stained, The Rite of Spring builds into a monumentally powerful crescendo and collapses into an archaic, and brutally truthful reflection of life.