RITE OF SPRING (2019)
Photos by David Newkirk and Jeffrey Juip
Rite of Spring is a site-specific performance staged in June 2019 beneath the 600 North highway overpass in Salt Lake City, Utah, adjacent to train tracks and the remains of an industrial steel mill. Responding to Stravinsky’s score through an austere, minimalist choreography, the work examined the intersections of patriarchy, critical sustainability, environmental justice, and displacement. The performance was situated on land historically associated with sacred hot springs used by Native American tribes, creating a layered relationship between the site’s Indigenous and ecological histories and its contemporary industrial infrastructure. Against the scale and weight of concrete, steel, traffic, and urban development, the choreography treated the body as a site of tension between the natural and the constructed, the sacred and the industrial, memory and erasure. By bringing The Rite of Spring into this particular landscape, the work explored how systems of development transform land and bodies, and how traces of earlier relationships to place persist within - and sometimes resist - the structures built over them.
Choreography/Artistic Director: Charlotte Boye-Christensen
Concept and staging: Nathan Webster
Performers: Sydney Sorensen, Tara McArthur, Liz Ivkovich, Joseph Blake, Joshua Lindsay
Lighting design and technical director: Cole Adams
Sound: Adam Day
Costumes: Mallory Prucha
Make-up: Lunatic Fringe.
Read Brian Kubarycz’s review for Slug Magazine of Rite of Spring here