Danser et se (con)fondre avec la terre

Abstract

In 1975, Pina Bausch (1940-2009) created her own version of The Rite of Spring, adding it to the list of over 204 versions of Vaslav Nijinski’s major 1913 work. In her piece, she made sixteen women and sixteen men literally dance on the earth. This earth-nature was far from being just an element of the scenography. In this article, my aim to revisit this emblematic work in her repertoire and the history of dance at large from an ecofeminist perspective: how does choreographic writing reflect a particular relationship between women and earth? And how does this relationship allow us to understand the influence of nature on gestures and on a form of fundamental corporeality within the aesthetics of the piece? We will see throughout how this dance makes use of imagination to think about ecofeminist questions from a choreographic point of view, especially when dealing with an essential form of speech within the movement that comes directly from women’s experience.

Keywords

• Female dancing-corporeality
• Pina Bausch
• Rite of Spring
• dance
• nature
• ecofeminism