Amal Choucri Catta finds this particular rite a bit too florid Danses qu'on croise and Rite of Spring , Cairo Opera Ballet Company and Cairo Opera Orchestra, cond Nader Abbassi, artistic director Erminia Kamel, artistic supervisor Abdel-Moneim Kamel. Main Hall, Cairo Opera House, 3 to 7 April, 8pm Danses qu'on croise opened the five ballet evenings scheduled from 3 to 7 April at Cairo Opera's Main Hall, with the Cairo Opera Orchestra conducted by Nader Abbassi and the Cairo Opera Ballet Company under the direction of Erminia Kamel and the supervision of Abdel-Moneim Kamel. This one-act ballet was produced for the Cairo Ballet Company several years ago by Thierry Malandin, following his original choreography for the Opera de Nantes in 1987. Over the years the dance has been subjected to several revisions, though without altering the plot. It tells of four couples meeting and dancing at a cabaret. As the dances go on the girls take a liking to their male partners and the boys enjoy dancing with the girls. Sets and costumes are all grey and pink. In time one young lady discovers that she really should have chosen someone else's partner. She suddenly decides to leave, grabs her handbag and vanishes. The three other girls follow, leaving four perturbed young men behind. They finally decide to go home. Then one by one the girls return only to find the dance hall empty. They then leave and the boys return. Disconsolate, they sit on the empty pink bench. One of them, however, waves the card his partner had given him as an afterthought. Maybe all is not yet lost, maybe they will meet again. As the music comes to a close the dancers take their bow. Entirely performed to Johannes Brahms' Hungarian Dances, Thierry Malandin's Danses qu'on croise were beautifully executed and much appreciated by the audience. The second dance on the programme, Igor Stravinsky's two-part ballet Le sacre du printemps, was originally premiered at the Theatre des Champs Elysées on 29 May 1913. It provoked a riot among the audience who objected to the violent subject, its shocking music and Nijinsky's "unballetic" choreography. On the opening night many audience members left their seats making such a din that the orchestra could not be heard by the dancers, which evidently led to a chaotic situation on stage. Stravinsky became ill, recovering only a few weeks later. Born into a pre-revolutionary Russian world dominated by the Orthodox Church, Stravinsky's music always had a fixation with bell sounds: a sense of bell- like attack and resonance suffuses his music on every level, particularly the chords. He was the prime mover of the deployment of equal rhythmic units in complex metres. The superimposed metres of generate fistfuls of orchestral chords. Gifted with an insistently exploratory mind, Stravinsky was rooted in tradition: first in the folk music and sacred chant of Russia's countryside and the Orthodox Church that were among his earliest childhood memories, then in European Art music from the Baroque age and earlier. A White-Russian of upper middle-class ancestry, born into a society caught in a time warp, he adapted with remarkable success to life in the 20th century. His father was principal bass at the Marlinsky Opera in St Petersburg and his mother was a good pianist. He thus grew up in a world of high-level music-making. The relationship with his parents seems to have been extremely fractious, maybe as a result of his notorious impatience with everyone and everything around him. Serge Diaghilev, impresario of the Opera Russe Company, was planning a parallel ballet company and, needing a new work for its 1910 season, commissioned Stravinsky to compose The Firebird, a two-act ballet which brought the composer instant fame. One year later he created Petrushka, followed by the eruptive earth- stamping power of . Composed around 1911, the ballet is divided into two parts: the adoration of the earth, and the sacrifice. The "Rite" takes place by the end of Winter presenting the death -- by sacrificial dance -- of the young girl, the Chosen One, that makes Spring possible. In primitive times in Russia there has been a real fear that the dark, freezing winter would never end and Stravinsky himself said that some of the "harshness of the chords had come from his memory of the sound of ice crashing as the Russian winter broke up". There is no real plot in , which is divided into several moving sequences evoking ancient rites honouring Springtime and the earth, and closing with the sacrificial dance of the maiden's death. At Cairo Opera's Main Hall, however, the performance opened with the Nile Bride, offered as a sacrifice to Hapi the Nile God in the hope of bringing about an ample flood. The music of this part was by Abbassi, from Raya wa Sekina, and the choreography was by Joseph Russillo from France. The Nile prelude gave the impression that it was part of Stravinsky's main "Rite", which was hardly fair. That eventually opened on a chilly, wintry night with dancers foreshadowing the violence that was about to erupt. The Introduction was followed by the maiden's dance of the "Augurs of Spring" and the "abduction game" in which the victim is chosen, the "Spring rounds", the "game of the rival villages" and the "dance of the earth", culminating in the "Sacrifice". The orchestra was perfect, and so were the corps de ballet and the soloists -- Erminia Kamel, Hani Hassan, Serguey Bolonsky, Alexander Kiriniok, Essam Ezzat, Katya Ivanova, Vera Krapivko, Ahmed Nabil, Alexander Onishenko and the four couples of Danses qu'on croise. It must be said, though, that the costumes, the sets and a large part of the choreographic conception were somewhat disappointing. Russillo did not seem inspired: several sequences were too long, too monotonous and too repetitive. Often devoid of colour and tending visibly towards the obscene, this Rite of Spring is in dire need of a thorough revision which next time, hopefully, will not mix the Nile with the Volga.
