Overview

DATE & TIME: 22-24 AUG 8PM

DURATION: 75 Mins

LOCATION: Festival Theatre (13-29 Nicolson Street, Edinburgh EH8 9FT)

TICKET PRICE: £15 - £35

TICKET PURCHASE: https://www.eif.co.uk/whats-on/2019/riteofspring

Yang Liping’s Rite of Spring reflects her artistic ambition to refine her artistic “voice” further by offering her interpretation of one of the most revered musical scores for dance in the 20th century. It will be a full length production. The work will be constructed in three sections with the second section using the original Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. The first and last section will use a specially created new score, inspired by traditional music from Tibet. 

What sets Yang’s version apart is that it will be rooted in Chinese culture, especially Tibet’s symbols of nature as well as beliefs in the cyclicity of life and death, of duty —and the inevitability of rebirth. In Yang’s Rite of Spring the chosen one will volunteer her-self as the chosen one — sacrificing herself for the common good, in the knowledge that she will be reincarnated. The tale staged by this Rite of Spring will actually be the journey of the Chosen One from fear and doubt to the empowerment she finds in her sacrifice. 

It is not Yang’s intentions to create a narrative real world but to find an abstraction of a physical universe where time, space and life co-exist in the transient sense of a cycle.