The Rite of Spring

The Rite of Spring is a groundbreaking ballet with music by Igor Stravinsky and original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. The story is simple enough: A young girl dances herself to death in order to provide a sacrifice for a pagan ritual. However the work is famous for its sexual content, primitivism, radically anti-ballet dance style, and extremely innovative and dissonant musical score, all of which caused a huge uproar when it premiered in Paris in 1913. In the end, Rite of Spring had a huge influence on the fields of both music and dance, and it is still very highly regarded today.

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Tropes used in The Rite of Spring include:

• A Man Is Not a Virgin: Subverted by Kenneth MacMillan's 1962 version for the Royal Ballet. Although the Chosen One was set on a woman, MacMillan always intended the part to be open to either sex, and the RB's most recent staging used men in the role.
• Doomed Protagonist
• Downer Ending
• A Fete Worse Than Death: Come party at our pagan celebration in honor of springtime! Dancing, music, and Human Sacrifice!
• Lost Episode: Nijinsky's original choreography, despite being groundbreaking for its time, was never properly recorded, so most later productions rechoreographed it using their own material. The closest anyone's ever gotten to an authentic revival of Nijinsky's choreography was the Joffrey Ballet's painstaking restoration in 1987.
• Sensory Abuse: The reason people rioted was because it was so grating on the ears and eyes in comparison to normal ballet.
• Serious Business: The first performance was so radically unconventional that it caused a riot in the theatre.
• Uncommon Time: Stravinsky's score does this a lot. For example, "The Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One" changes, in consecutive measures, from 9/8 to 5/8 to 7/8 to 3/8 to 4/8 to 7/4 to 3/4.
• Virgin Sacrifice