SACRÉ 101 – AN EXHIBITION BASED ON ‹THE RITE OF SPRING›
15.2. – 11.5.14

With the exhibition project "Sacré 101—An Exhibition Based on The Rite of Spring," the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst traces the interplay between dance and the visual arts in a sustained engagement with Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). The work features revolutionary music and choreography, and its premiere in Paris one hundred and one years ago is regarded as one of modernism’s great breakthrough moments. This ballet, in which a virgin sacrifices her life to the god of spring and dances herself to death, has lost none of its fascination. In addition to a selection of Le Sacre dance documentation—some of the material is presented in an exhibition setting for the first time—the show features works of art, most of which were created specially for the occasion by the invited artists, that engage with the ballet, its context, and its history in a wide variety of ways, while focusing on the iconography, as well as on aspects regarding the content. Xavier Le Roy and Alexis Marguerite Teplin contribute performance pieces that are integral parts of the presentation, which also includes the American artist Eleanor Antin’s seminal work Recollections of My Life with Diaghilev 1919–1929 (1977–1978) and the graphic oeuvre of Vaslav Nijinsky (ca. 1919); both have never been displayed in Switzerland.