A different ballet game

As an acclaimed pan-African revival of Pina Bausch's version of 'The Rite Of Spring' comes to the end of a global tour, Kathryn Bromwich finds out why the piece is so demanding

- Kathryn Bromwich

In a rehearsal studio lined by floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Anique Ayiboe is hunched in on herself, a ball of nerves. Tonight, the 33-year-old Togolese member of the African dance company École des Sables is performing the sacrificial victim in Pina Bausch's landmark 1975 interpretation of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. “Before

the show, every time I'm incredibly stressed," she says, speaking in French via an interpreter. "I can't eat, and all my fellow dancers know I've got a big solo coming up. When I'm performing this role, I feel like I've got the weight of the world on my shoulders."

You can understand why Ayiboe might feel like this: the role a young woman who must dance herself to death in accordance with a pagan ritual celebrating the advent of spring - is one of the most demanding in the repertoire. Not only that, but Stravinsky premiered his monumental orchestral ballet in May 1913 in this very theatre, in front of an audience that included Marcel Proust, Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. What happened next has become part of ballet mythology. The audience was so incensed by Stravinsky's polytonal, dissonant score and Vaslav Nijinsky's jagged, angular choreography, not to mention the events on stage, that people began fighting one another and throwing vegetables. Stravinsky later wrote that he was so disgusted and upset by the mocking laughter that greeted the first bars of the Introduction, he left the auditorium to watch the rest of the performance from the stage wings.