RITE OF SPRING 

TUSSOCK DANCE THEATER (TAIWAN)

The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring began its journey as a commission for the 2020 Hong Kong Dance Exchange. A solo dance rendition of the first act of Stravinsky’s revolutionary work, the piece tells the story of a victim’s transformation into perpetrator, condensing into the body of the performer both the collective violence arising from existential fear and the victim’s consequent struggle and resistance. It uses montage to deconstruct the music’s narrative structure, switching between different roles in order to reveal the tendencies of human nature as it is mired in desire—its oscillation between good and evil, gradual and irreversible path towards disorder, and final disintegration in the prophesied apocalypse.

The pandemic that hit not long after the premiere, made its impact felt across the globe and left no one unscathed in its wake. Humanity bore this epoch-making crisis collectively. As the world came to a standstill, facing a threat invisible to the naked eye, the fragility of human life was rendered incredibly distinct, the air suffused with an inexpressible existential angst. As a way to seek spiritual peace, the choreographer turned to literature, cinema, and music, reflecting on human nature and humankind’s collective karma, all the while recording the process into writing. Through the lens of our common ancient cultural heritage, he was seeking a more deeply rooted vital force. 

The covid pandemic also kept the choreographer from taking up his Asian Culture Council’s New York fellowship, granted originally in 2020. In the fall of 2022, as the world reopened its doors, he was finally able to embark on a six-month trip to New York, offering new focus for creative work, performance, and research. In particular, it allowed for investigations into funeral artefacts and civilizational collapse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The stay also provided new impetus for sorting out and finalizing the structure of The Rite of Spring, as digesting these cross-cultural readings and experiences opened up vistas for the exploration of new corporeal vocabularies. Finally, this developed into a more fluid language of freely switching between cyclical forces, in turn made up by a glossary of mundane behavioral and texturally fragmented movements. Together with new creative applications of images, costumes, and props, this made possible the expression of an existential environment characterized by lack of choice; and within it how ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ are trapped in suspended time; how ‘intention’ and ‘thought’ are tugged and tempered in between light and dark; and how the individual gets consciously wiped out and vanishes in a dim tide of collective violence—thus also reflecting our world’s present state of affairs, as well as the inner interrogation and dialectics of the creator and performer.