Le Sacre du printemps précédé de I-Tumulte, II-Pour Igor

ach choreographer has a Sacre within him. Jean-Claude Gallotta’s is carved with a compass in a schoolboy’s desk. Only just a teenager, hunched up in his grey overall and sad boarding school, the future choreographer was one day listening to his music teacher talking about Igor Stravinsky, the Russian Ballet, Nijinsky, the “scandal” of its first performance (at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913) and heard the work for the first time on an old Teppaz record player, no doubt slightly scratchy. Slumped on his wooden bench, he immediately started to daydream and was carried away by the images. He can still remember them today. Seraphic figures, sensual shadows, tormented bodies, forbidden awakenings, unexplained agitation, disturbing palpitations. These are the images that he wants to try to reassemble today into a choreography that will form the second part of the diptych begun with l’Homme à tête de chou the same dancers, the same moon-like light, the same energy that comes directly from the music.
Because Le Sacre is without doubt one of the frameworks in which he has found the impetus required to invent his choreographic journey, Jean-Claude Gallotta has chosen to work on the first version of the work, which he considers to be one of the best: raw, unaffected, without any decorative brilliance, directed and recorded by Igor Stravinsky himself.
Claude-Henri Buffard – October 2011