Ever since Nijinsky premiered his notorious Sacre du Printemps in 1913, the ballet has become a rite of passage for other choreographers. Artists as varied as Béjart, Pina Bausch and Michael Clark have all felt moved to recreate the work in their own image. How they handle it becomes a defining statement of their style. So it's no surprise that Carlotta Ikeda and her company Ariadone should produce a Rite which bears all the hallmarks of the Japanese expressionist form butoh: its seven female dancers masked from head to toe in white make-up, their bodies scrunched earnestly into slow moving postures of extreme visceral emotion.
What is surprising is that this sisterhood of keening, witchy dancers should also look back to 19th century ballet for their inspiration. The work certainly starts in classic butoh mode as the dancers appear wracked by the forces unleashed in Stravinsky's score. With their bodies curled into foetal self-protection and their faces frozen into howling screams, they seem maddened by the intensity of the primal, physical world. At other moments they seem to become nature itself as Ikeda gathers them into churning groups of movement, then lets them disperse into finely drawn tendrils of dance, suggesting flecks of foam on the water or rogue sea breezes. It's a vision of ancient terror and power, a very female vision of death and birth.
But then Ikeda seems to be calling up ghosts of older dancers to elaborate her vision, using fragments of Stravinsky's original Rite mixed with sounds of wind and sea, industrial machinery and distant wisps of song. A trio of women in ratty tutus, limbs contorted with savagely subversive humour, become mad little cygnets from Swan Lake. There are doll like Coppelias whose marionette cuteness is underscored with erotic mischief. Best are the Wilis (the ghosts of jilted women from Giselle) who cross the stage with a haunting off-kilter craziness.
The work also neatly turns around the final sacrificial solo in Rite - with Ikeda herself performing a dance of survival, and apparently containing the world's forces within her own inscrutably slow movement. It's a fine image, as fine as many which appear in the work. But its power is diluted by Ikeda's overall failure to pace and build her material. Butoh is always slow, but at best it sustains an intentness, a focus which staves off our restlessness. Ikeda's Haru No Saiten slips in and out of focus too readily within its 80-minute duration. It induces moments of wonderment but whole sections, unfortunately, of boredom too.
