Rite of Spring

Spring 2023

About the piece

(Le Sacre du Printemps)

The Yale Dance Lab is thrilled to announce the continuation of the Rite of Spring project that began in the spring of 2022 with a choreographic workshop ahead of performances in February 2023 in partnership with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Yale Schwarzman Center.

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.

Dancers: 

Laila Blavatnik (Berkeley ‘23), Erita Chen (Jonathan Edwards ‘26), Sophia DeVito (Trumbull ‘23), Tiffany Lau (School of Management ’24), Tadea Martin-Gonzalez (Jonathan Edwards ‘24), Gabrielle Niederhoffer (Pierson ‘23), Virginia Peng (Murray ‘25), Isabel Shi (Benjamin Franklin ’26), Santana Vannarath (Berkeley ‘24), Gavrielle Welbel (Murray ‘23), Isabella Zou (Timothy Dwight ‘23)

About the Artists

Emily Coates is a dancer, choreographer, and writer who has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented by Danspace Project, Performa, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Ballet Memphis, Wadsworth Atheneum, University of Chicago, and Yale Art Gallery, among other venues. Recent work includes “A History of Light” with Josiah McElheny at Danspace Project. She is co-author, with particle physicist Sarah Demers, of Physics and Dance (Yale University Press 2018), and associate professor at Yale University, where she created the dance studies curriculum. 

Lacina Coulibaly was born in Burkina Faso. His professional dance career, deeply rooted in African traditional dances, later merged with European contemporary influences to create a uniquely African choreographic expression. In 1995, Lacina created the award-winning Cie Kongo Bâ Teria with Souleymane Badolo and Ousseni Sako, which toured extensively in Africa,Europe and the US. He has also danced and choreographed with international dance companies (Salia ni Seydou, Faso Danse Theatre, TchéTché, Urban Bush Women), and collaborated with such artists as Emily Coates, Amy Sullivan, Kota Yamakazi and Seydou Coulibaly. Lacina has taught at Brown University, New School, Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard College, EDIT and CDC, la Temitière.