Vigour and verve from a unique new Rite of Spring: Dancing at Dusk reviewed

Dancing at Dusk captures the final rehearsal of a new version of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. It’s only the third time a company other than Bausch’s own has been handed the reins to this piece, and it’s a treat to see its raw, convulsive rhythms reinterpreted by a new generation of performers.

Filmed on a beach in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal, it features a cast of 38 dancers from 14 African countries, assembled to bring a fresh lens to Bausch’s 1975 cult classic, itself a modern reckoning of a decades-old ballet. (Bausch’s original famously underscores the misogyny of the sacrificial virgin, doomed to dance herself to death.) This collaboration with the Senegalese L’école des Sables was meant to tour but this run-through unwittingly became the performance the world would see.

When English National Ballet tackled Rite in 2017, the test was whether this classical troupe could shake off their codified lines to inhabit Bausch’s stark, cantilevered choreography. The École des Sables dancers must also find their way into unfamiliar territory, but with the added challenge of coalescing as a green company with a range of backgrounds, including traditional and contemporary African dance.

The familiar beats are all there — Stravinsky’s baleful bassoon, the fateful crimson dress, the ritual assemblies of violence and lust — but there’s a lot to discover too. Where ENB brought an energising consistency to their performance, sneaking balletic precision into Bausch’s pulsing arrangements, the vigour here is powered by deviations in the dancers’ artistic choices, the moments when they aren’t moving like a watertight pack but individuals hellbent on survival.