The Rite stuff

It takes a daringly optimistic choreographer – or a blithely unaware one – to tackle the 20th century's greatest piece of music. Many have tried, most have failed, their invention submerged by a score of colossal scale and titanic achievement. The beast is, of course, Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps or The Rite of Spring, a kraken that awakes in the orchestra pit to lash its tail and flex its terrifying muscles. It is, the Albanian-French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj says, quoting Arthur Honegger, the atom bomb that launched 20th-century music.

Preljocaj created his Rite of Spring last year and brings it here, the latest in a long line that spans, incredibly, 89 years. This monument to iconoclastic modernity is, it seems, rather old. It was also, from the start, conceived as a ballet in collaboration with Nicolas Roerich who not only made the designs, but also with Stravinsky devised the scenario. They imagined a prehistoric Slavic tribe who herald spring with the traditional sacrifice of a maiden – she dances to death to propitiate the gods of fertility. Diaghilev claimed the score for his Ballets Russes and Vaslav Nijinsky was designated as its choreographer.

Nijinsky was only 23. He had mesmerised Europe by his dancing and was now starting out as a choreographer. His first ballet, L'après-midi d'un faune (1912) had already revealed him as ballet's first modernist, exploding received dance ideas at the same time as Cubism was shattering and fragmenting visual perception. He may have been inarticulate, but he had an original and determined, hardworking mind. He approached each project as a tabula rasa eliciting its own terms of reference. For The Rite of Spring, his third piece, he invented an anti-ballet primitivism, with turned-in feet and blunt, bestial contours. Suddenly ballet was no longer decorative and decorous, but a brutal expression of inner states. Nijinsky was painting humanity at its most instinctive, crystallising a score that evoked the wild and savage spring of the Russian steppes, when the ice cracks and procreation begins.

Richard Buckle's biography Nijinsky gives a detailed account of the creation of The Rite of Spring. In rehearsal it wasn't just Nijinsky's movement that was a problem. There was also the score's entirely alien complexity, which negated all known rhythmic and orchestral procedures. With no consistent melodies to latch on to, with time counts that shifted with each bar, the dancers found themselves hopelessly entangled. To help, Diaghilev enlisted Marie Rambert (then Miriam Ramberg), star pupil of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze whose system of eurythmics promoted the analysis of music through movement.

Maria Piltz was cast as the sacrificial Chosen Maid. Because she had problems understanding her solo, Nijinsky danced it for her. Watching, Rambert thought it very powerful, his movement stylised and controlled, yet exploding in paroxysms of fear and grief. When Piltz danced the role in public, she managed only a pale reproduction, although the audience was impressed.

Especially remarkable was that Nijinsky arrived at these new angularities by himself, before Martha Graham or Mary Wigman invented modern dance, although he did see Isadora Duncan give a demonstration. When an acquaintance asked Nijinsky what his Rite was going to be like he joked, "Oh, you won't like that either," referring to his controversial Faune. He struck a flattened Faune plastique pose. "There's more of that kind of thing." But no one could have anticipated that the audience would actually riot at the ballet's Paris premiere on 20 May 1913, in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.

"The theatre seemed to be shaken by an earthquake," remembered the artist Valentine Gross. "It seemed to shudder. People shouted insults, howled and whistled, drowning the music. There was slapping and even punching. The dancers could not hear the music. Diaghilev thundered orders from his box. There was something wonderful about the titanic struggle which must have been going on in order to keep these inaudible musicians and these deafened dancers together, in obedience to the laws of their invisible choreographer. The ballet was astoundingly beautiful."

Meanwhile the conductor Pierre Monteux carried on with miraculous imperturbability. "The image of Monteux's back is more vivid in my mind today than the picture of the stage," wrote Stravinsky. "He stood there apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile. It is still almost incredible to me that he actually brought the orchestra through to the end."

When the noise became deafening Stravinsky left his seat to go backstage and found Nijinsky in the wings, standing on a chair, shouting counts at the dancers who couldn't hear the music. He had worked so tirelessly for this evening. His face was white, quivering with emotion.

The critics called it "le massacre du printemps" and the ballet was given only four more performances in Paris and two in London. Soon after Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky and Diaghilev in jealous fury ejected them from the company. In 1919, aged 29 he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. He disappeared and so did his Rite. When the ballet was revived seven years later, no one could remember his choreography and Diaghilev commissioned a new version from Leonid Massine.

All this leaves an irresistible mix of might-haves. Nijinsky had started to forge a new language, but madness snuffed it out. Of his ballets, only Faune remains. The Rite of Spring void has been beckoning choreographers ever since, brave or senseless souls undeterred by Stravinsky's formidable challenge. The best results come from those who understand that the music's barbarism needs movement divorced from the decorum of ballet. Massine's version, which survives, may have used ballet dancers, but it invented original shapes and swaying, surging groups infused with elemental terror.

Lydia Sokolova who danced the solo (Martha Graham took over the role in the USA) remembered it made her look as if possessed by an animal frenzy and nearly killed her with exhaustion. Maurice Béjart's 1959 choreography is filled with sexual imagery and made an enormous impact, leading to the establishment of his celebrated Ballet of the 20th Century. Pina Bausch's is perhaps the most powerful, the stage covered with deep soil, the dancers moving in great wheeling circles that echo descriptions of Nijinsky's.

There have been countless others – by Mary Wigman, Kenneth MacMillan, Glen Tetley, John Neumeier. There was Michael Clark's bawdy rock-gig version (Michael's Modern Masterpiece); versions using the score's two-piano reduction (Richard Alston, Paul Taylor); even solo versions (Molissa Fenley, Javier de Frutos).

There was also, in 1987, a part-reconstruction of Nijinsky's original by the dance archaeologists Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer. They claim to have retrieved 85 per cent, filling the gaps with their own choreography. It is the latter, in my opinion, which causes the piece's congealed, underwhelming effect.

So now here comes Preljocaj's, created at the instigation of Daniel Barenboim, music director at the Berlin Staatsoper. Barenboim conducted its first performances in Berlin, in which half of Preljocaj's France-based company merged with dancers of the Staatsoper's ballet (where Preljocaj is artistic advisor). Since then, the two companies each perform the production, although sadly Preljocaj's company lacks the means to use a live orchestra.

How does he view The Rite of Spring? "As a monument of dance and music which speaks of the human body and sexual desire." The sexual focus fits into the raw expressiveness and eroticism of much of his work. "The music reminds me of an adolescent who desperately wants to make love, but at the same time is afraid to. There is this notion of death in the act of sex and of tragedy and everything blends together." The Chosen Maiden's solo does not ultimately lead to her destruction. "She becomes like a lightening conductor for the others, recharging the group's energy and its instinct to procreate. But she defies her fate and she stays standing at the end, transcended by what she has achieved."

The music for him is "powerful and savage like a bulldozer". It is also paradoxical. "It has this barbarism, but at the same time it is constructed like a cathedral. That's its richness – a structured chaotic savagery. It's dangerous for a choreographer. Too much of the animal instinct, and you end up without any structure. Too much mathematical rigour, and you lose the human substance. You have to match the wildness, but you also have to give it coherence."

Ballet Preljocaj in 'The Rite of Spring' and 'Helikopter', Sadler's Wells, London N7 (020-7863 8000) 30 April-4 May; Brighton Dome, Brighton (01273 709 709) 7-8 May