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 protruding gold stamen, as leaf insects creep forward and a mantis like predator claims the stage, nature reveals itself as indifferent and ruthless, all appetite, reproduction, and extinction, with beauty deployed not as ornament, but as a means to an end.
From the opening image, a grub like form slowly coming into being, the production establishes its tone with quiet confidence. This sense of emergence, of something ancient and instinctual stirring into life, is sustained through the work’s carefully modulated progression. There is no narrative hand holding, but neither does the piece feel wilfully obscure. Instead, it trusts the audience to watch, listen, and remain present.
Lighting, designed by Matera alongside his dramaturgical and spatial work, is central to how that attention is held. It is consistently extraordinary, sculptural rather than illustrative, shaping bodies and space with precision and restraint. Figures are at times isolated like specimens, at others submerged in a hazy, particulate atmosphere that feels ritualistic and faintly toxic. The presence of haze and talcum powder, flagged in the content warnings, is not incidental. It becomes part of the environment itself, suggesting a world in which creation and contamination are inseparable.
Stravinsky’s music remains a formidable presence, but Teodora Castellucci’s choreography resists the temptation to simply chase its famous detonations. Movement often works obliquely, allowing tension to accrue through stillness, repetition, and held physical states. When motion does erupt, it feels earned rather than illustrative, the result of internal pressure rather than musical cueing.
The performers, working collectively rather than as individuated characters, bring a striking discipline to this material. Bodies are precise, often constrained, sometimes unsettlingly exposed. There is a palpable sense of control and risk in their physicality, with insect imagery, leaf creatures, hunters, hybrids, never tipping into whimsy. Instead, the performers function as components within a larger ecosystem, reinforcing the production’s central proposition, that ritual, survival, and desire are inseparable forces.
This is a serious piece, and it demands your attention. Those looking for narrative clarity or emotional catharsis may find it withholding. But for an audience willing to submit to its pace and atmosphere and otherness, The Rite of Spring offers a darkly compelling meditation on power, beauty, and the indifference of the natural world. It holds you, from the first stirrings of life to the final echoing darkness, not because it explains itself, but because it refuses to.
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 8th February 2026
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 50 Mins
