Sweet Freedom: Saturday Music Club: choreography to Stravinsky's THE RITE OF SPING

I have been the merest dabbler as an audience for dance, while appreciative (though the notion that ballerinas, and of course only ballerinas, should sacrifice their feet to en pointe strikes me at my distance as yet another iteration of "high-culture" hostility to women's health...if less pervasive than stupid shoes and less, if not enough less, damaging than footbinding). But listening to Greg Proops's podcast the other day, when in passing he strove to remember what bit of Fantasia was devoted to The Rite of Spring, got me thinking about how I'd never actually seen any productions of dance to this work...one wonders if the childishly hostile audience to its first performance would have been driven to more permanent distraction by any of the latter-day stagings...and at least of few of the excerpts below are probably Not Safe for Work, given that they employ nudity or translucent costume; they are essentially arranged here in rising "levels of explicitness"...given the reports of the rape and beatings in Delhi sparking a movement against official nonchalance by Indian police agencies (and the larger culture), perhaps the Preljojac struck a particular nerve for me, not least due to the performance of Nagisa Shirai as principal dancer/sacrificial virgin.

PBS series Keeping Score:

Watch Stravinsky's Rite of Spring on PBS. See more from Keeping Score.