The Rite of Spring by Mats Ek

English National Ballet, London Coliseum November 2022

In 1992, the Mark Morris Dance Company came to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time and presented Morris’s Dido and Aeneas, with the choreographer taking not one but two leading roles. After the curtain fell, I went straight to the box office and bought a ticket for the next day’s performance of the same piece.

I did the same thing when the Tanztheater Wuppertal brought Pina Bausch’s Nelken to that festival, and I would have done it again last month when English National Ballet concluded an evening of three new works with Mats Ek’s The Rite of Spring. Trapped by previous commitments, I missed the chance.

Every dancemaker who tackles Stravinsky’s historic score Le Sacre du Printemps takes on the burden of history, knowing that roughly 200 others—from Mary Wigman to Maurice Béjart, Kenneth MacMillan, Paul Taylor and Richard Alston—have created their own interpretations since Vaslav Nijinsky made the first one in 1913. Ek himself choreographed a version in 1984, when he was the director of the Cullberg Ballet; he said recently, “I was never really happy with what came out 38 years ago…I wanted to tell this story in a way that makes it mine, in the way I read the music.”

Nothing I’ve ever seen approaches Ek’s singular response to this music. To my eyes, he has essentially welded one startling ballet to the narrative later associated with another, Les Noces.

Commissioned together, Nijinsky’s choreography and Stravinsky’s music for Le Sacre du Printemps evoked a pagan ritual in which a maiden, chosen as a sacrifice to the coming of spring, dances herself to death. As choreographed by both Bronislava Nijinska and Jerome Robbins, Les Noces traces an equally brutal ritual, an arranged marriage, that unfolds in painful detail. The bride accepts her future, the groom boasts, the mother weeps, and outside the nuptial bedroom, the whole town waits to view the proof of consummation on the blood-stained sheets.

Having quietly introduced the polite parents, their daughter and the cocky groom, Ek spins the events in unexpected directions. Far from submissive, the girl tries to reject the marriage and then, tearing off her veil, rejects her new husband; their measured duet evolves from anger to wariness to a pact of shared authority.

Possibly because the two are enjoying each other too much, the community turns hostile. The women shed their identical robes and beat the bride with them. Crawling on their bellies like soldiers, the men hound the groom out of town. But here’s the surprise—the bride fights back, swinging at her attackers with the staff that once blessed her groom until, triumphant, she sees them collapse at her feet.

Any preconceptions you might bring to The Rite of Spring probably won’t apply. The parents’ impersonal behavior transforms them into universal abstractions. The costumes’ uniformity—shell pink, robes for the women and pyjamas for the men, all softly rigid like modified kimono—guarantees the ensemble’s anonymity. The looming silhouetted rooftops suggest a threatening metropolis anywhere. But the ballet is wholly itself, deliberately non-specific in its hints of narrative, economical in its vocabulary and structure, compelling in its austerity and memorable in its dramatic effect.

Ek has said, “I am not trying to provoke or make any kind of statement,” so what I saw as a feminist slant on Le Sacre du Printemps may not tally with his intention or the experience you might have. It doesn’t matter. Just see it if you can. English National Ballet’s performance schedule through June concentrates exclusively on full-evening narrative works. So you’ll wait a long time for Ek’s stunning creation to come around again.

The company returns to the London Coliseum in The Nutcracker, December 15 to January 7, followed by Swan Lake, January 12-22. londoncoliseum.org