Cultural Exchange: The Rite of Spring

How 38 dancers from 14 African countries came to dance The Rite.

By Sarah Compton, arts writer

On February 16–18, 2024, a double-bill production that includes Pina Bausch’s iconic The Rite of Spring, a “ferocious roar of a piece” (The Guardian), will be performed by an ensemble of more than 30 dancers from 14 African countries. It’s been 13 years since the death of Pina Bausch, yet this program, assembled through a collaboration with the Pina Bausch Foundation, École des Sables, and Sadler’s Wells, is inspired by her pioneering spirit. It represents only the fourth time that any group of dancers outside her home company Tanztheater Wuppertal has danced her ground-breaking The Rite of Spring, the first occasion it has been performed by a specially recruited ensemble, and the first time it has been performed by dancers from African countries.

But for Germaine Acogny, co-founder of the influential École des Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, a center for the teaching and development of traditional and contemporary African dance, this project also represents the culmination of her appreciation for Pina Bausch.

“I liked Pina and I liked her work,” she says, today. “There is a synergy between what we both were doing. For me, Sacre [The Rite of Spring] should be danced by dancers from African countries because it is something universal. When I first saw Pina’s Rite of Spring, I felt it was an African rite.”

The idea for this version of Sacre, however, came from the Pina Bausch Foundation, which is committed to keeping Bausch’s work alive both by preserving an archive and by encouraging new companies to perform and explore the creations under the supervision of dancers who worked with the choreographer herself.

Salomon Bausch, Bausch’s son and chair of the foundation, believes that these “transmission projects” will help increase understanding of one of the 20th-century’s most significant and important bodies of work. “I am really curious to learn what is inside this heritage,” he says. “What is it? What does it mean to people today? We need these new projects where we try to provoke things and learn new things, to do things in ways we have not done before.”

This particular project was always ambitious, even before its planned premiere at the Théâtre National Daniel Sorano in Dakar was derailed by the coronavirus pandemic. More than 200 dancers submitted video audition tapes to Josephine Ann Endicott and Jorge Puerta Armenta, the former dancers with Tanztheater Wuppertal who were in charge of this staging. A total of 137 were invited to workshops in Burkina Faso, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, where they were taught excerpts from the material and a final cast of 38 was chosen. Then the rehearsal process began in earnest.

The dancers represent a range of backgrounds and techniques, which has made the project thrilling. “It will be different,” says Acogny. “But that’s what makes it exciting. These dancers will do what all dancers do; they will interpret the movement of Pina Bausch. The dance is always the same, but depending on what area you live in, there are different energies. The Chinese will dance it differently from the French, the Germans from African Americans.” For Endicott, there were challenges in staging the work. “The many different backgrounds created a big soup that we had to bring together,” she says. “But the dancers had such spirit. We were all together in Pina’s world somehow.”

She noticed the way in which the dancers were particularly receptive to Stravinsky’s music—adapting to it more quickly and easily than some classically trained dancers. In this, the collaboration reaches back to this version’s creation in 1975, when Bausch laid particular emphasis on the score. “She had this huge respect for the music,” remembers Endicott, who was in the first cast. “It wasn’t easy finding the movements. We tried this and that until she was content. She always followed her instinct. The dance is the music, the dancers are the music. That’s the key.”

The piece also relies less on technique and more on a total immersion in Bausch’s visceral response to the score and the theme. “How would you dance if you knew you were going to die?” she asked, when trying to find the right steps to match the elemental power of the music. Her answer to that question means that Sacre, with its earthy stage of peat, requires extraordinary commitment and exposure from its dancers. Endicott observes: “You run with your heart and forget all you have learnt before and just come out and be yourself. It has to be real. If you are not exhausted at the end, you haven’t danced it properly.”

Acogny, now 79, remembers the impact the piece had on her when she first saw it performed in 1996, when Bausch restaged it for the Paris Opera Ballet. “In her work, Pina works with the human being, but she also works with the depths of humanity,” she says. But her own first encounter with the score was through the version created by the French choreographer Maurice Béjart, with whom she worked in Brussels and who founded Mudra Afrique, where Germaine was the director, the school from which she laid the basis for African contemporary dance. “It felt like a [primitive] rite and there were even elements of traditional African dance in his production.”

Later, at the age of 70, Acogny, who is known as the mother of African contemporary dance, performed the solo Mon Elue Noire, choreographed by Olivier Dubois, to the score. “Whenever I danced it, I invoked the name of Béjart, and I invoked Pina. Before I danced, I used to ask them to give me the energy to dominate the music. And I used to offer Stravinsky a cigar and a vodka as well,” she says.

Her close association with the piece means that it feels apt that the other work on this radical program is common ground[s], a duet Acogny has created with the equally legendary Malou Airaudo, one of the dancers who worked with Bausch from the beginning of her career. “I was very nervous to meet her because she was so close to Pina, but it has meshed together very easily,” Acogny says. “It has been very profound.”

The duet arose because Salomon Bausch wanted there to be something new in the program. “It has been the meeting of two women to find out where they are in their lives, what they have been, what they have to say to each other,” Acogny says. Airaudo, who is 74, agrees. “We don’t know each other but we find each other. We don’t have anything to prove. What we do is what we are. We were together, sharing together, and what came out is what we felt.” She says creating the piece was quite straightforward. “We didn’t speak about choreography. It just happened. She did a solo and I did my solo and then we were doing it together; it was very soft, very calm somehow. Maybe because of respect or love. It was very simple.”

Respect and love fill this adventurous program, which both looks back to Bausch’s heritage and puts down a marker for a way of presenting her work in the future. It also allows dancers from African countries to experience Bausch’s work for the first time—and lets other international audiences see them at work.
As Alistair Spalding, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Sadler’s Wells, remarks, “It really is an exchange. It takes this repertoire to a continent where it hasn’t been seen before. And we get a chance to see different dancers bring a different spirit to Pina’s choreography.

“There is a very strong passion about this project. It’s not just dancing in a dance piece; there is more to it. It is an opportunity for these dancers to experience something they never had a chance to do before.”

Germaine Acogny agrees. “It gives these dancers an opening and a curiosity to do other things than they are used to doing. It will make them grow.”