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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Les Noces / Le Sacre du Printemps

January 30, 2020
Theatre Square, 1, Sankt-Peterburg, Russia, 190000

Vaslav Nijinsky and Bronislava Nijinska. Brother and sister. Dancers both, choreographers both, visionaries. He went mad, she thrived. This Mariinsky program presents ballets in which each worked in collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. The pagan power and blind barbarism of Nijinsky’s 1913 Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)—restored to performance by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer in 1987—muddied Edwardian illusions and presaged the Great War to come. Nijinska’s Constructivist classicism of 1923, Les Noces (The Wedding), is cold and fanged. Scathing Slavic modernism. —L.J.