Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co, SITI Co: A Rite
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company
SITI Company
Event Attributes
Choreographer Bill T. Jones and SITI Company’s Anne Bogart have always loved each other’s work, but they had never collaborated until this year, when they brought their formidable creative forces together to create this new piece.
In A Rite, these groundbreaking artists have deconstructed the original score of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring to create a provocative meditation on the power of singular new works of art to alter the way we think.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
SITI Company most recently appeared at the Center in Café Variations (September 2012).
Article from American Theatre Magazine
The anticipation was palpable at the first performance at the Smith Center. The audience was diverse, something of a microcosmic replication of the audience that first greeted Rite in Paris, only this time there was no riot: The spectators remained enthralled from the first moment, when a bare lightbulb faded to reveal the combined companies, their original affiliations virtually indistinguishable… What followed was indeed a deconstructed Rite, a postmodern collage of text, music and dance that narrated a century of angst…
The experience, say the creators, proved transformational for both companies…The 15 performers—nine from the Jones/Zane company, six from the SITI company—become one, their talents indistinguishable except to the most discerning eye.
– MATTHEW SIGMAN, American Theatre Magazine, April 2013
Review by MoCoVox.com
In fact, it first seems like these actors kept interrupting this interesting dance performance to talk about everything from the Paris premier to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to World War I.
Or did the dancers keep interrupting these actors? I would say about fifteen minutes into this piece it all clicked for me, and what is going on is easier to sense than to describe.
– DAVID CANNON, MoCoVox.com, Sunday, February 17, 2013
Review by CriticalDance
In the impressive joint work “A Rite,” the two artistic directors, Bill T. Jones and Anne Bogart of SITI Company, melded not only dancers and actors, but music, history, and so much more (for example, particle physics!).
– CARMEL MORGAN, CriticalDance, Saturday, February 9, 2013
Review by The Washington Post
Here was a true experiment, unfolding before our eyes, but no less engrossing for its scattershot view of a century-old experiment.
– SARAH KAUFMAN, The Washington Post, Saturday, February 9, 2013
Review of world premiere by New York Times
The ready accessibility of such a famously difficult work — the way its shock has become chic — is part of the subject of “A Rite,” a remarkable, often irritating and sometimes haunting new theater piece...A hybrid, with actors and dancers, it recalls the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch in the way its performers talk as much as they move and make their individual personalities highly theatrical (and these also sing).
– ALASTAIR MACAULAY, The New York Times, Sunday, January 27, 2013
Preview of world premiere by Huffington Post
Watching a rehearsal for the upcoming weekend’s performances, it was impossible to tell who was a dancer and who was an actor — the collaborative team has coined the term “dactor” to describe the merging of the two disciplines on stage.
– WILLIAM ROBIN, Huffington Post, Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Resources at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library
Our neighbors at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library have compiled a list of available resources relevant to this performance:
SITI Company
- Books
- Recordings
- Articles and reviews: New York Times; Washington Post; Theatre Journal