In Performance: Laurent Chétouane – Sacré Sacre du Printemps (Vienna, Austria)

Laurent Chétouane – Sacré Sacre du Printemps © Oliver Fantitsch

One of the most influential works of music and dance history, Le Sacre du Printemps, is the theme of the latest work by Laurent Chétouane.

Igor Stravinsky’s composition, which initially met with incomprehension and harsh rejection at its première in 1913, has since inspired numerous artists. Understood as a musical epochal work of modernism, the stramge is placed at the core of our society, adapted through this integration and as a result robbed of its strangeness. Laurent Chétouane picks up on these considerations: how can one leave the strange as strange? He shifts the view from the ritual sacrificial victim of spring to the choreographic and visual »sacrifice« of the work, Le Sacre du Printemps itself, and he explores our inability to allow the strange to exist in its otherness.

In the two-part evening, he places the seven dancers in the field of tension of Stravinsky’s oeuvre on the one hand, and a new composition by the musician Leo Schmidthals on the other, and drafts a vision of a coexistence with the strange that is based precisely on this nonintegrability and non-portrayability.

• Tanzquartier Wien