Sacré Sacre du Printemps

Sacrificing the sacrifice

For his Sacré Sacre du Printemps, Laurent Chétouane has chosen as his starting point one of the most influential works in the history of modern dance. Unlike Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch, he shifts the topic of ritual spring sacrifice to a visual, choreographed ritual sacrifice of Le sacre du printemps itself. He asks himself why we as a community wish to assimilate the foreign; we want to make integration possible but in doing so make the ‘intrinsic otherness’ disappear. Chétouane focuses on how we fail to allow the outsider to exist in his ‘otherness’. In Sacré Sacre du Printemps Chétouane and his group of dancers examine the possibility of nevertheless opting for a community without victims.

• Laurent Chétouane first studied to be an engineer and then opted for a drama course at the Sorbonne in Paris. He went on to study directing in Frankfurt and since 2000 has directed several productions, in Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Athens, Oslo and elsewhere. Since 2006 he has developed four dance projects, Tanzstück #1 - #4. “O”, a solo with Mikael Marklund, was performed at the Avignon Festival.

‘Vaslav Nijinsky’s erstwhile epoch-making and eruptive break with ballet tradition is most captivatingly mirrored in Chétouane’s experimental arrangement.’ - Süddeutsche Zeitung