A Rite

For its thirtieth anniversary, the Company will create a major new dance-theater work bringing together two leading American directors and their companies. A Rite  is an intriguing and powerful collaboration between artists Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart and their respective companies – Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company. Coinciding with the one-hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Jones and Bogart combine forces to explore the impact of this revolutionary piece of music, imagining the consequence of hearing the score played for the very first time.

Artists’ statement:
Our intention is to create a meditation upon the phenomenon of the encounter with Igor Stravinsky’s music and with the history that the piece carries upon its back.  We are taking the work apart and putting it back together again in a way that we both hope will speak to audiences everywhere.  The music is prime and the social-historical context is a point of departure as is the community created by the joining of our two companies.  We both believe that the work allows us the opportunity to reflect upon the human condition: sacrifice; creative and spiritual rebirth; the individual against or with the community.  Much of the spoken text will be by Jonah Lehrer from his chapter on Stravinsky in his bestselling book Proust Was a Neuroscientist.  The result will not be a re-construction of the performance and subsequent riot at the infamous Parisian premiere, but rather a deconstruction of the music and its impact upon the development of the human mind.
– Anne Bogart & Bill T. Jones

World Premiere in January 2013 at Carolina Performing Arts, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
 

A Rite was commissioned by Carolina Performing Arts at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A Rite was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional commissioning support provided by: The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.