OU Dance Students to Perform Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring Sept. 9

This fall Oakland University’s dance students have an amazing opportunity to work with one of the ballet world’s most prestigious dance and design teams, and at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 9 members of the public who love dance are invited to see the result of their work at Eisenhower Dance Laboratory Theatre, 103 South Street in Rochester.

The event will be a lecture-demonstration, led by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, with sections of their reconstruction of Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring, performed by the OU dance department. The significance of the dance will be explained as OU dancers demonstrate.

Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, who are based in the UK, have been awarded a residency with the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. The celebrated team will also be working at Juilliard and North Carolina School of the Arts this fall. The team are renowned for their work in reconstructing lost ballet masterpieces from the early twentieth century. They will work with the OU dancers on The Rite of Spring, (Le Sacre du Printemps), which is one of the most significant pieces in all dance history.

The combination of Igor Stravinsky’s music and Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography caused a near riot in Paris when it was first premiered by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe in 1913. The ballet crystallizes the moment when dance broke the bonds of centuries to embrace modernism. Sacre is a 20th century treasure.

The lecture-demonstration is built around quotes from an essay by Jacques Riviere, who wrote a remarkable essay about what caused the riot in Paris. They will be recited by Archer with projected images, as Hodson and the OU dancers perform the excerpts of Sacre that Riviere evokes.

The lecture-demonstration is free and open to the public. For more details, and to let the Oakland University Dance Department know you plan to attend, please visit their Facebook Event Page.

The School of Music, Theatre and Dance at Oakland University provides pre-professional, professional, liberal arts, and general education in the performing arts through artistically-grounded academic programs and diverse performance opportunities.