Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)

Yale Dance Lab, Yale Symphony Orchestra, and the Yale Schwarzman Center bring live music and dance to Commons in two performances of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring). 

The Rite of Spring famously premiered in Paris in 1913 with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky. Both the music and the choreography hit a nerve, as harbingers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. The music lives on in orchestral repertories, and the concert dance world has seen countless restagings that formally rework the original story to speak to contemporary concerns.

The Yale Dance Lab-Yale Symphony Orchestra production will draw on maps and travel images from the Beinecke collection, tracing transnational networks of cultural exchange across time to meditate on planetary crises and care.

The production will be co-choreographed by Emily Coates and Lacina Coulibaly (faculty members in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies), conducted by Yale Symphony Orchestra Music Director William Boughton.

The creative team includes lighting designer Tom Delgado (‘09 MFA) and costume designer Aidan Griffiths (‘23 MFA).