History doesn't really repeat itself with this buoyantly multi-faceted project – unless you count the riot of new ideas and emerging talents as a nod in the direction of the now-legendary 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring (choreographed by Nijinsky, designed by Nicholas Roerich.)
Or, actually, you could just sit back in shock and awe that the various parties involved – music, ballet and technical students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (RCS), design students from the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and members of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – joined up all the intended dots in only six months, creating a bold and impressively polished response to the original ballet.
Choreographer Hubert Essakow occasionally introduces an image, or a gesture, from Nijinsky's idiosyncratic vocabulary, but his short, two-part Monad bypasses imitation in favour of exploring contrasting themes of destruction and survival within the Rite.
Likewise the two young RCS composers – Jay Capperauld for Part I, Hugh Holton for Part II – feel able to catch at teasingly fleeting echoes of Stravinsky without compromising their own interpretation of a very biological-cellular vision.
Part I, Lysis, forcefully underpins a choreography of invasive (male) energies that reduce the lyrical female corps to two fallen forms. Part II, Mitosis, has a lean muscularity that sits well with the gathering cohesion that sees the "tribes" – garbed in some fabulously inventive costumes by the GSA students – finally bonded in a snaking linkage of limbs.
Throughout, the brick flanges of the main Tramway space carry striking video works (by RCS students) that chime in with Essakow's overview of fragmentation and regeneration.
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