Compagnie Heddy Maalem's Simmering Rite of Spring

Thanks to the Seattle Theatre Group, Seattle is among a handful of U.S. cities (including Boston and New York) that have had the chance to see Compagnie Heddy Maalem's interpretation of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The company was in town for a one-night-stand on Saturday at the Moore Theatre, which is building a reputation for bringing contemporary dance downtown.

While Maalem is Algerian, with a French mother, his company boasts fourteen dancers from Mali, Benin, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Martinique and Mozambique, and they are perfect for his reimagining of Rite as taking place in a whirling, blaring, metatastic city (the town fathers of Lagos may not be honoring Maalem soon for having selected their city as his inspiration).

Maalem presents Rite of Spring in its two parts, with an additional introduction, entre acte, and conclusion that add to his vision with projected video and soundscapes: rain, assorted cacophony, hoofbeats. Yet you still can easily see Stravinsky's work--abductions, rivalries, the selection of a anointed one, the sacrifice--under the surface, because Maalem is (here, at least) a literalist. While it's not that hard to spot an abduction and rape in his choreography, it's oddly two-dimensional--or just functionally focused, as if what's important here is the way the weight shifts to the ball of the foot.

While many of his dancers have ballet training, this work is not about elegance; it sounds like Maalem is at least as interested in pure movement--the fact of joints and muscle--as dance. What's most striking about his Rite are the unison folk dances, the percussive use of the tensed foot, the crush of skin-on-skin contact in his human maelstroms, aggregations of bodies that just as suddenly splinter into duos and trios.

Ritual is, if nothing else, repetitive, so it feels unfair to complain about the sparseness of the movements on display. But still, if it's not your ritual, repetition doesn't emphasize, but glazes eyes. If the work in itself didn't overwhelm us, the dancers' fierceness made an impression. And the boldness of Maalem's response, in bodily picking up Stravinsky's icon and showing us today's politics of discordance, is attention-getting in its own right.

Compagnie Heddy Maalem performing Le Sacre du printemps. Photo by Ben Rudick, courtesy of Jacob's Pillow.