Among those who closely follow dance, Pina Bausch’s “The Rite of Spring” (1975) is legendary. To bring it up within earshot of anyone who knows Merce Cunningham from Martha Graham is to invite wide eyes and near-breathless urgings to drop everything and go if you ever have the chance to see it live. So last fall, when the Park Avenue Armory joined forces with the Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections festival to stage the production’s New York premiere, the 1,500-seat Wade Thompson Drill Hall sold out almost immediately. Some of the best seats in the house went to the impeccably dressed leaders of the city’s most prestigious cultural institutions, like New York City Ballet. Those in the know, it seemed, did in fact “drop everything” for the German luminary’s ferocious exploration of how pain and fear eat away at humanity.
That production of “The Rite of Spring” is an exemplary case study for how Dance Reflections is shaping the medium’s future. Our readers don’t need reminding that the art world, for all its glamour, is also perennially resource-strapped. But the power of the 118-year-old fine jewelry house transcends borders, institutions, and, yes, balance sheets. Bringing “The Rite of Spring” to New York entailed collaboration between Germany’s Pina Bausch Foundation, Senegal’s École des Sables, Saddler’s Wells in the U.K., and Dance Reflections curator Serge Laurent, who oversaw the novel repertory pairing of Bausch’s composition with “common ground[s],” from École des Sables founder Germaine Acogny and dancer Malou Airaudo.
