The Rite of Spring – Traverse Theatre
At the Traverse Theatre, as part of the Manipulate Festival, Dewey Dell’s The Rite of Spring announces itself as a work that expects, and repays, sustained attention. Running a concentrated fifty minutes, this is not a production that courts easy admiration or quick interpretation. It is slow, deliberate, and insistently moody, drawing the audience into a sealed weird world that unfolds according to its own internal logic.The original scandal of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring lay in its pagan brutality, Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes presenting sacrifice as the necessary price of renewal. In Dewey Dell’s reimagining, conceived and directed by Agata Castellucci, Teodora Castellucci, and Vito Matera, that focus subtly shifts. As a monumental red flower opens to reveal a prot...