Rite on the ground(s)
By Garth Grimball
On Feb 16-18, Cal Performances brought to Zellerbach Hall a special production of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. For only the fourth time since the dance’s creation, it was performed by dancers outside of Pina Bausch’s home company Tanztheater Wuppertal. This production features dancers from 14 different African countries. The idea for this restaging came from the Pina Bausch Foundation. It was meant to premiere and tour in 2020. Four years later it is a gift to see it live.
Of the hundreds of interpretations of Igor Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, Pina Bausch’s production from 1975 has managed to sustain its influence across time and geography to become one of the most famous dances in the modern dance canon. This is due in large part to the set piece that is as simple as it is effective: soil. The stage is covered in tons of soil, instantly creating a different world on stage before the music starts or a dancer enters.
Bausch’s choreography is vivid and distinct enough to keep the soil from being gimmicky, but the soil’s impact has created a gimmick-like signifier. You can refer to the dance as the dance with the dirt/soil and people will know what you mean. If nothing else you will remember seeing the stage covered in soil and its effects on the dancers and costumes.
But the dance is so much more than soil on a stage.
The original libretto for Le sacre is inspired by Russian folktales and hinges on the selection of a sacrificial girl who dances herself to death for Spring. The selection process and death dance are the elements most directly translated in many iterations.
Bausch’s choreography opens with a few footlights puncturing the darkness as if searching for someone. As the bassoon solo sets the eerie tone female dancers rush into the space one by one. Dressed in pale chemises their energy is spooked but their movements are certain. A red dress lies on the ground, avoided.
Stravinsky’s score uses rhythm over melody in its worldbuilding. Its percussive polyrhythms beg to be met with physical exertion and deep connection to the floor. Bausch meets the music with motifs of deep second position plies and arms that bat through the air thwacking the skin over muscles and ribs.
The narrative is loose in this iteration. Bausch uses the libretto like the soiled square of stage space—it is a porous container to embody group think, mob mentality, and collective ritual. When the male dancers enter the tension builds and releases in a series of crescendos. During the “Spring Rounds” section of the score, all the dancers process in a circle to the ominous stair-climbing-beat before collapsing into the soil when the music explodes in a full symphonic scream.
In the final third the 36 minute score a female dancer is chosen, is the wearer of the red dress. Anique Ayibo performed the role of the chosen one. By the time of her selection the 37 dancer cast was dank with sweat and soil. They became an extension of the fertile ground.
Ayibo surrendered herself to the dance. The role requires an absolute legibility of effort, an anti-grace ritual. As her arms wrapped and unwrapped her body like a spider enclosing its prey, she lunged and whipped her torso through space. The brief moments of relief from motion were filled with wild-eyed stares at those who chose her.
Bausch made the chilling choreographic choice to have the cast remain still and focused on the chosen dance for the entirety of her solo. The collective gaze heightens the intensity; we the audience become implicated in the sacrificial rite as we share in watching Ayibo dance to disintegration.
Before The Rite of Spring performed power in numbers, Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo performed a quieter ritual of similar length. Co-choreographed by Acogny and Airaudo, common ground(s), was commissioned to pair with Bausch’s dance. Airaudo is a former Tanztheater Wuppertal dancer, and Acogny was elemental in the producing of this staging of The Rite of Spring through her role as founder of Ecole des Sables, an international education center for traditional and contemporary African dances in Senegal.
common ground(s) opens with the two dancers seated center stage. There are several piles of stones and a bundle of sticks scattered across the stage. Both dancers are septuagenarians with decades of performance experience. They move with confidence. They embrace each other, they watch each other, they perform tasks separately and together. At one point they speak to each other.
“What are you doing?” asked Acogny.
“I’m thinking of Pina,” answered Airaudo.
The tone of the dance was reverent. Reverence for the dancing body, for dance lineages, for the rituals that ground us.
Garth Grimball is a dance writer and artist based in Oakland, CA. He is a contributor to SF Examiner and Dance Media. He is the editor of ODC’s Dance Stories.
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