The Rite of Spring. tender memories of queer affection

https://www.publico.pt/2023/01/11/culturaipsilon/noticia/dinis-machado-procura-individualidade-queer-sagracao-primavera-2034664

Continuing  a series stimulated by the work of Nijinski, the choreographer takes to  Teatro do Bairro Alto a re-writing of this seminal work for five bodies  in search of their individual space.

It's  not a rare situation. When entering the room to watch a show, it often  happens that the public finds the performers already on stage, favoring  the understanding that something is happening on stage that precedes the  arrival (and, perhaps, extends beyond the departure ) of that specific  group of external gazes. But, in the case of this Rite of Spring,  reimagined by choreographer Dinis Machado (she/her pronouns), there is  something more concrete that can be sensed when entering Teatro do  Bairro Alto, in Lisbon, where the work is being presented from this  Thursday (and until Sunday): the existence of a space with its own  rules. Even more than that: a space where each of the five performers  (MC Coble, Ves, Mia Meneses, Ali Moini and Sumi Xiaomei) seems to be  governed by rules that only concern them.

More  than any metaphorical reading of the piece she created with and for  these performers, Dinis Machado, a Portuguese choreographer based in  Sweden since 2012, wants to evoke "a progressive structural empathy in  the spectator", as she explains to PÚBLICO. This means that, as the  performance progresses, in its various parallel dimensions, those  watching see themselves, slowly, entangled in the different layers of  references that command the movements on stage. Different layers because  the method adopted by the choreographer is based on linking each  performer to "an audio score that they are listening to all the time and  that poses problems". "There are times", she adds, "when this score  gives them an instruction for the next five minutes, and other times  when there are new instructions almost every second". And the  instructions themselves are sometimes descriptions that one of the  performers makes of the gestures of another.

It's  a whole complex device – which performers know in advance, but with  which they are not familiar enough to be able to anticipate everything  that will follow – thought up by Dinis Machado in the sequence of pieces  she has been working on (among which the solos Yellow Puzzle Horse and  L'Après-Midi d'Une Faune) "around the work of Nijinski". A "paradoxical  relationship", says the choreographer, about what attracts and repels  her in figures like Nijinski. If, on the one hand, their works suggest  "many relationships with queer bodies and experiences", they are  nonetheless "narratives marked by very heteronormative ideas".

And  therefore, in this Rite of Spring, subtitled Tender Memories of Queer  Affection, no female figure can be seen as "the most beautiful, the  chosen one who receives the right to dance until death". Dinis Machado  is more interested in questioning "a kind of tragic premonition about  the mainstream perspective that queer bodies are impossible". And where  the original Rite of Spring, whose premiere changed the history of  western dance, approached a space of celebration and ritual using  unisons, here unisons do not exist because bodies are never equivalent –  for cultural or physical reasons.