Object of Study: Pina Bausch’s 1975 “The Rite of Spring”

This is the piece that spurred me to dance. I felt myself needing to get up and move after watching a video of this piece on youtube in 2022. I had no prior knowledge of the Rite of Spring and its cultural significance, but I was pushed to look further purely due to the evocation of emotion within me produced by witnessing this piece. 

In December of 2023, I watched a performance of the piece performed by dancers selected for this reproduction at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. I then wrote this piece connecting the dance to Sigmund Freud’s concepts of repetition and ritual mourning for my psychoanalysis course. 

From the moment I first witnessed Pina Bausch’s 1975 choreography of “The Rite of Spring”, it captured my attention and held me in its grasp. The ballet, set to Igor Stravinsky’s evocative score, drew me into feelings of curiosity, excitement, and a compelling sense of mystery. The performance stirred questions within me—what was the meaning behind this interpretation? And why did it have such an impact on me? The performance was elusive, modern, and explicitly abstract, unlike any work of dance, let alone art I had ever seen before. It’s a ritual while being a performance. But it’s also a ritual in two ways: a ritual in story and a ritual in action.

The entire narrative of “The Rite of Spring” revolves around a compulsion to repeat the ritualistic sacrifice of the chosen one. The rites are performed seasonally as the cyclical and repetitive nature reflects an unconscious drive to reenact a sacrificial ceremony, potentially rooted in primal and cultural instincts. Freud’s concept of the “compulsion to repeat” suggests that individuals unconsciously seek to recreate and relive past experiences, even those that were distressing. This compulsion arises from the unconscious need to master, understand, or find a resolution for unresolved issues from the past. The performers in the rite of spring embody this as they try to resolve or atone for the past and reap a favorable spring through the sacrifice of the chosen one. Transference, a central concept in psychoanalysis, involves the unconscious redirection of feelings and attitudes from significant figures in one’s past onto the analyst. In a more abstract sense, one could interpret the relationships and interactions among the characters in “The Rite of Spring” as embodying transference dynamics. The dancers’ movements become a means of processing and expressing shared grief, emphasizing the significance of ritual as a cultural mechanism for dealing with loss.

The chosen one’s symbolic role and the dynamics among the community members may reflect unconscious patterns reminiscent of interpersonal relationships from the past. As I delved deeper into Bausch’s interpretation, the themes of repetition and transference struck a chord. Like Freud’s concept, Repetition serves as a pathway through which unconscious material emerges. In dance, hours of practice and repeated movements allow a dancer to unconsciously repeat or internalize specific gestures, and this made me curious about the form and techniques applied by the dancers of the piece.

Bausch’s version is an avant-garde interpretation of the story and music. It deviated from the conventions of traditional ballet narratives. Form and technique are also not as important as movement and flow. The energy and rhythm cannot be broken as the ritual must be performed. Instead of a linear story, she presents a series of evocative scenes, exploring the intricacies of human emotion and relationships. The ballet has no setting, no characters, no backdrop. Pina Bausch sets her dancers upon a rectangle of dark dirt on which their feet will leave their steps as evidence of the ritual performed. Bausch’s stage design, deliberately minimalist, places the dancers on a rectangle of dark dirt, leaving their steps as evidence of the performed ritual. This intentional simplicity directs attention to the dancers and their emotive movements. Symbolism is inherent in “The Rite of Spring,” with each movement carrying deeper, unconscious themes related to fertility, sacrifice, and the cyclical nature of life and death. Bausch’s choreography taps into these primal and visceral themes, exploring the unconscious forces associated with rituals. Bausch’s “Rite of Spring” is a portrayal of diverse human experiences, from love and conflict to vulnerability.

The climax of the ballet, the sacrificial dance, is a moment of intense emotion and dissonant rhythms. The chosen one’s exposure and the deliberate falling of her dress strap add layers of fear, passion, and heat to the ritual. The choreography involves the chosen one moving with urgency and fervor, embodying the profound significance of her sacrifice. I could feel the terror, the panic of the chosen one during her sacrificial dance at the end of the piece where she leaps and flails and repeats and repeats and repeats the haunting movements from earlier in the piece, this time faster, then faster, until you can hear her breathing in a live performance, she is exhausted and relying on her memory to repeat and carry her through this dance, which must end with her death. Fear, passion, heat, and movement overflow and fuel the chosen one in the sacrificial dance. Bausch asks us, “How would you dance if you knew you were going to die?” The fuel of the libidinal death drive is poured into the choreography as the chosen one moves as if she is being pulled down by the music, pushed on by it, towards her inevitable end.

As a viewer, what does this evoke? The chosen one has her breasts exposed as the strap of her red dress (placed upon by one of the male dancers as a sign of her being a chosen one) is what is assumed to have intentionally fallen off, but she cannot reach for it, she must finish the ritual.

As I continued to reflect on the ballet, I found myself drawn to the dynamics of transference and the concept of mourning. Bausch’s portrayal of pagan ritual dancers engaged in collective mourning for the sacrificial chosen one resonates with Freud’s ideas on the “work of mourning.” The dancers’ movements, gestures, and interactions become a communal expression of grief, transcending individual experiences. Freud’s concept of the “work of mourning” involves a psychological process of resolving grief and detachment, and the pagan dancers’ movements may parallel this process within the context of a ritualized community. Connecting Bausch’s choreographic choices to Freud’s ideas on mourning adds a layer of psychological depth to the performance. The dancers, through their ritualistic mourning, engage in a shared process of grappling with loss, reflecting not only the individual psyche but also the communal and cultural dimensions of mourning explored by Freud.