PATHÉTIQUE & THE RITE OF SPRING (LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS)

Ludwig van Beethoven - Igor Stravinsky

A new creation for the dancers of the Rijeka Ballet is performed alongside Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata. This piano sonata is a captivating composition in three parts, full of melodic contours and textures with twists in temperaments, changeable moods and expressions. The score is a script for a work that, although abstract, draws inspiration from different sources, including the piano itself.

The dancers are dressed in white, on a white floor in a black room, embodying different aspects of piano and music. Moving in the form of canons, they look just like keys, like playing a piano in octaves. In one part, the dancers conduct the music as a conductor would.

Individual dancers move independently of one another, just as it sometimes seems to be the case with a pianist’s right and left hand.

The group occasionally dances in white sneakers, adding buoyancy to the fast movements as well as a sense of speed and acceleration. Sneakers add another dimension to the quality of movement and a sense of rhythm and percussion.

The sneakers are steeped in personal and symbolic meaning. They are the main basic intersection between the body and the space, allowing movement everywhere in the surroundings.

Choreographically, the work follows the light and shadow of the music and interprets these shifts in the atmosphere with diverse movement dynamics. The music is divided into three movements, and in each of them there is a wide range of alternating characters. The work is reversed and twisted on a mysterious journey of emotions. The dark and dramatic opens the way to the playful and witty.

Today the awareness of nature and its survival, and thus the survival of the human species itself, has taken on an equally important role in social life as politics, faith, economics and other social systems. It is precisely this thought that, in the face of global and local elemental crises, led us to a new way of experiencing and listening to Igor Stravinsky’s canonical work The Rite of Spring. Even today, after more than a hundred years, it exudes freshness and excites and inspires as only nature can with its beauty.

Although in Stravinsky and Nijinsky’s ballet the sacrifice is described as a young female person (the “other,” the “weaker,” but more fertile being), offered by a strict patriarchal system to “satisfy” the Earth, today this young woman has been replaced by a new victim – the Earth itself. We can say that today our Earth has become a victim of people in the same social structure that controls, exploits, pollutes and controls everything that surrounds it.

The ballet, choreographed by Maša Kolar and inspired by the nature of the faunal world, presents a gallery of scenes in which animalistic vocabulary, in play with a series of interwoven gentle melodies, energetic sections and unexpected compulsive rhythms of the score, frees a new path to experience Igor Stravinsky’s composition – as those who celebrate life. The choreography evokes the living natural world as a unique and spectacular wonder that shines exclusively in the diversity and richness of individuals, connected by mutual support and sustenance.

We have decided not to strive for the intellectual and philosophical. We have opted for something that excites us, something that celebrates life and the synergy of nature and man, the individual and society.