Choreographer Rigos is back with a double Stravinsky project
A year after the premiere of his last project, leading Greek choreographer Constantinos Rigos is back with a production for Thessaloniki. Performances of «Igor’s Room,» a production of the National Theater of Northern Greece, began last Saturday and runs through January 29 at the northern city’s Vassiliko Theater. A two-fold dance production that had also been performed in Athens last summer, the performance is based on two landmark works by Igor Stravinksy, «Les Noces» (The Wedding) and «Le Sacre du Printemps» (The Rite of Spring). Written during the same period of the artist’s career, both works were inspired by Russian folk music tradition. First performed on May 29, 1913, in Paris, when the Russian composer was 30, the unorthodox nature of «The Rite of Spring» heralded the arrival of modernism in music, while also igniting tension between rival camps. «It seemed like a very enchanting idea for me to bring together, face-to-face, ‘The Rite of Spring,’ a composition I’d wanted to work on for many years… with ‘The Wedding,’» Rigos noted. The production’s «Wedding» portion, performed amid a white stage setting, is dense in choreographic vocabulary as it swings from expressionism and neoclassical to contemporary dance. Dionysis Fotopoulos provided the production’s stage settings and costumes. Stelios Tzolopoulos is the lighting director. The choreography’s dance cast includes Polly Voikou, Cyril Grisett, Constantinos Kafantaris, Panagiotis Kontonis, Yiannis Martos, Amalia Benett, Constantinos Rigos, Nancy Stamatopoulou, Christian Cetienne, Dimitra Haralambous, and Penny Christopoulou.
