Next week Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre are bringing a double bill of Stravinsky ballets to the Oxford Playhouse. David Bellan talks to company director-choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan

The Rite of Spring, (Le Sacre du Printemps), opened in 1913 to mocking jeers and catcalls from the Parisian audience.

“Fetch a dentist” cried one man, “fetch two”, cried another. Stravinsky’s music, with its churning rhythms and clamorous orchestration, was too much for them. Even the orchestra had at first refused to play it, while Nijinsky’s ground-breaking choreography was considered ludicrous and shocking.

The dancers had hated it, unable to cope with the complex, changing rhythms, and had only managed to learn the work with help from the young eurythmics practitioner Marie Rambert. There’s a marvellous reconstruction of the pandemonium at the first night, and of the admittedly rather odd dancing, in the movie Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky.

Today the music is seen as a masterpiece, not an insulting piece of avant-garde rubbish, while audiences are far less stick-in-the-mud, and are willing to give any piece of experimental dance at least a chance. There are now versions by many distinguished choreographers. Michael Keegan-Dolan told me what led him to add to the canon.

“As a choreographer one always has the desire to make work to the music of Igor Stravinsky, and in particular that piece. I saw Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring in Amsterdam when I was about 26. It’s a great piece of work, but what got me most excited was the idea of creating this whole energetic event, with the music, with the visual imagery and with choreography.”

Keegan-Dolan’s version, like most, sticks with the idea of a primitive ceremony in which a chosen maiden is selected for ritual sacrifice. It’s visually striking, with men in papier-mâché dogs’ heads and women in hares’ heads at one point. There is brief male nudity, and a fair amount of symbolism. Michael says the ideas came easily, but I asked whether putting steps to the Stravinsky score was difficult.

“Yes, it is difficult. Maybe if I had more musicological technical skill at my disposal it would have been easier. I worked with the conductor to translate the score into eurythmic patterns that I could communicate to the dancers. It takes a little bit of time. I think Nijinsky got caught out, and wasn’t able to translate that score in to a language that his dancers could understand; and music that we still find challenging today must have been off the scale a hundred years ago. I found a formula and gave it to the dancers. We sat in a circle like kindergarten children, and we clapped it out and stamped it out, and they embodied the poly-rhythms.

Then you go through this horrible phase where everyone’s counting and everyone’s thinking, and nobody’s making any sort of theatrical event happen. But after that it really started to come to life. It’s matured into a piece of work that I’m fairly happy with now. It’s musical and visceral and direct.”

There were no riots at the premiere of Michel Fokine’s ballet Petrouchka in 1911, and it became one of the greatest successes of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes. Unlike The Rite of Spring, Petrouchka has been continually performed by various companies, usually in versions close to the original. Put simply, three puppets in a puppet theatre come to life: Petrouchka, (a clownish figure ), The Ballerina and The Moor. Petrouchka falls in love with The Ballerina, but she loves the Moor, who kills Petrouchka in a jealous rage. It doesn’t sound much, but this is a marvellous work full of excitement and pathos. Fokine’s choreography for Petrouchka himself is a masterpiece of characterisation. How has Keegan-Dolan re-worked this iconic piece, I asked.

“Well, the crux of it is that the story is far too simple to be of interest to me. Although the original ballet was very well received, looking at it on the Internet (you can see Nureyev in the title role), it seems to fail in so many ways.

Petrouchka’s character disappears for a long section of the ballet, and then returns at the end, so dramatically it’s difficult. So what I tried to do is tip my hat to the three characters, but spend a lot of my time focusing on the beauty of the music and its power, because it gets overlooked.

“It was written two years before The Rite, and in some sections you can hear beginnings of The Rite. So I didn’t do the story, but there is reference to elements of that original dramatic line. But there is a story of some sort, and it’s directly connected to the idea that The Puppeteer represents Diaghilev, who dominates and controls his young lover Nijinsky, represented by Petrouchka. Then, at the end, there’s a feeling of opening up and relief.

“That’s why I paired these works together. The Rite is very much entrenched in the earth, and at the end opens up into light; Petrouchka starts in the light, struggles a bit in the middle, and at the end there’s a feeling of opening up and relief.”

Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre
Oxford Playhouse
Tuesday and Wednesday
Tickets: 01865 305305 or visit oxfordplayhouse.com