The Rite of Spring at Teatr Wielki - Opera Narodowa, Moniuszko Auditorium

There is probably no other piece of music written for ballet more famous than this one. All the more so because 100 years after the premiere at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs Élysées (29 May 1913), Igor Stravinsky’s music has lost none of its barbaric beauty, nothing of that absolute ecstasy. The Warsaw production is a brilliant experiment presenting three different choreographies: the world-premiere (and congenial) version by Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary interpretation that Frenchman Maurice Béjart created for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1959), and the iconoclastic, practically disco version by Israeli Emanuel Gat (2004). This is a brilliant experiment because each choreography hits the spot – if not the spot of music, then the spot of audience expectations.