Laurent Chétouane: Sacré Sacre du Printemps

In Sacré Sacre du Printemps, the choreographer and director Laurent Chétouane chose The Rite of Spring, one of the most important works of music and dance history in the twentieth century, as the subject for his new work: Igor Stravinsky's composition, which initially met with miscomprehension and rejection at its 1913 premiere, is closely linked to Nijinsky's choreography, and has inspired numerous other choreographers, from Maurice Béjart to Pina Bausch, to create works of their own. In Rite of Spring, today understood as a musical epochal piece of modernism, the exotic is placed in the center of our society, but yet by way of this inclusion is assimilated and thus robbed of its actual unfamiliarity, and Chétouane takes up this issue in creating his own choreography. In shifting the subject from the ritual sacrificial victim to the choreographic and visual ›sacrifice‹ of the Rite of Spring itself, Chétouane engages with our incapacity of allowing the foreign to exist in all its difference.

In a two-part evening that places the seven dancers engaged in the rite in a musical tension between Stravinsky's music on the one hand and a new composition by the musician Leo Schmidthals, Chétouane develops the vision of a development that allows for living together with the foreign, precisely on the basis of its non-integratability and unrepresentability: the sacrifice of the Rite of Spring as a new ritual for the other allowed to remain other.

Laurent Chétouane developed an incomparable style in the late 1990s. In his theater works, he presents habits of vision by consciously exhibiting texts, gestures, and movement as if controlled from beyond. His works represent an attempt to find the ›ethics of a movement‹. Chétouane is one of the most controversial directors in the German theater today and one of the most original artists in the world of contemporary dance.