\n<\/p>\n
Those containers, once tipped over, spilled peat across the stage. Like gardeners on a timer, the crew transformed the space as it buried the floor: This time, it was earth and not music, as in \u201ccommon ground[s],\u201d brought the outside in.<\/p>\n
As \u201cRite\u201d \u2014 which on Wednesday featured 31 performers but can include as many as 34 \u2014 develops, the dancers, moving in mass formations, tear their way across the stage, jumping, turning and running as the peat sprays into the air and sticks to their sweaty bodies and the women\u2019s white slip dresses, like paint. The men, bare-chested, wear black pants.<\/p>\n
They all aren\u2019t just dancing steps; they\u2019re also struggling to survive. In making her \u201cRite,\u201d set to Stravinsky\u2019s classic, driving score, Bausch asked her dancers a question that lives on as a dramatic, inspiring point of departure: \u201cHow would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?\u201d<\/p>\n
These convulsing bodies \u2014 with, generally, the women separated from the men \u2014 are desperate. The men are ominous and the women terrified, but everyone is unhinged. It\u2019s as if they\u2019re possessed and in possession of bodies that have little choice but to bend and buckle; their legs descend in pli\u00e9s with their feet wide apart while their straight arms, held overhead, crash down between their legs. Over and over, it\u2019s like watching a hammer batter a nail.<\/p>\n
A red dress is passed around until Serge Arthur Dodo, a dancer from the Ivory Coast, identifies the Chosen One: Luci\u00e9ny Kaabral, a dancer from Cabo Verde, who fights her fate with glittering fury. Now wearing the red dress and sweeping across the stage with frenzied, frantic rage or quieting down to display a fury of disbelief, it\u2019s as if her mind is drifting away from her body in stages until, finally, she collapses onto the peat-covered floor.<\/p>\n
Has Bausch\u2019s \u201cRite\u201d ever felt this grim? In it, free will doesn\u2019t exist; and now, nearly 15 years after her death, that sentiment doesn\u2019t feel as foreign as it once did. But this \u201cRite,\u201d even more than relevant, is alive, with blistering clarity.<\/p>\n
The Rite of Spring\/Common Ground[s]<\/strong><\/p>\n Through Dec. 14 at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; armoryonpark.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n