THE RITE OF SPRING

There’s no use trying to wish away the many recent stagings of Igor Stravinsky’s music for “The Rite of Spring”. That score hasn’t been tamed, nor since Nijinsky has it been matched. It remains unsettling. Gat, an Israeli choreographer, deploys salsa dancing as visual counterpart to Stravinsky’s perturbing rhythmic pulses.

The Israeli choreographer Emanuel Gat reimagines a Russian ritual through the rhythm of salsa. [...] The integration of salsa’s stylistic nuances with Stravinsky’s music is impressive. [...] Ultimately, it becomes a showcase, focused on celebrating the elegance of movement and the perfection of dance.

[The] five dancers move through Gat's simmering, undulating salsa steps in crimson light that enhances a red rug defining the action hotspot while adding a note of domesticity. [...] They weave the movement crisply and fluidly to the recorded orchestration of Stravinsky's score. It remains a hypnotic, inexorable ritual driven by primal instincts.

Emanuel Gat ostentatiously strips The Rite of Spring of its narrative—and yet the orchestra roars, the music reverberates once again through the National Opera House. [...] The most happens in the minds, in the hearts, in the music. In the deviations from the strong convention.

It’s a kind of stunt, hearing in the ritual sacrifice of Stravinsky’s score the ritual of a crowded dance floor in which three women and two men engage in the Möbius-strip partnering of salsa and swing dancing. This reading of the score, if perverse and diminishing, is almost entirely persuasive — as it was when Mr. Gat’s company first brought the work to New York in 2006.

The audacious and sensual way in which Emanuel Gat dares to incorporate salsa movements into Stravinsky's score, the challenges he sets for himself and his dancers, resolved with fascinating elegance, and the extraordinary velocity of this beautifully crafted choreography [...] find a remarkable interpretation here, full of fluidity and controlled energy.