LONG BEACH BALLET TO DANCE AN ‘80s ‘RITE’

When Vaslav Nijinsky and Igor Stravinsky collaborated in 1913 to create “Le Sacre du Printemps,” the public outcry made history. Twentieth-Century art was ushered in with a compulsive acceleration of tension and explosiveness. The audience didn’t approve.

Now, David Wilcox, artistic director of the Long Beach Ballet, takes on the same great subject and score in what he calls “the most contemporary version of ‘The Rite of Spring,’ ” Friday in the Long Beach Center Theatre.

“When I listen to the music,” he rhapsodizes, “I don’t see the traditional story of Russian peasants who get together every year for this big frenzy to sacrifice a maiden for their own kicks or so the gods would smile on them and make their crops grow. . . . I see something more timeless, something more worldly.”

In Wilcox’s original concept (now modified), the sacrificial virgin turned out to be a modern-day Angeleno--a mass murderer. But now, he says, the role is “evolving away from the idea of a serial killer into something and someone more recognizable to the audience, a contemporary kind of story ballet.”

Wilcox claims that he isn’t daunted by the host of “Rite” choreographers, including Leonide Massine, Maurice Bejart, Kenneth MacMillan, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Pina Bausch, who have preceded him.

Nor, he insists, is he imposing a distinctly contemporary sensibility on Stravinsky’s music “just to be different,” explaining that he feels a kinship with the composer’s “dissonant and crazed sounds” even as he wishes to break from the traditional pagan rite depicted in the three or four versions of “The Rite of Spring” that he’s seen.

Indeed, he says his saga--of an Everyman rejected by a girlfriend and his family who is driven by sex and careerism to hang himself--is “too modern and too emotional to use the classical (vocabulary) of pure ballet.”

“Classical ballet is contrived,” he insists. “It’s a romanticized expression of movement. And when you say ‘I hate you!’ in classical ballet, you don’t really go into a natural ‘I hate you!’ stance. You go into a very contrived, postured one, because it’s supposed to look pretty at the same time. It’s very difficult in classical ballet to do an ugly emotion because it’s not allowed.”

In Wilcox’s “Rite,” the corps dancers represent society, he says. “They manipulate the man, his parents and the only kind person he ever meets as a youth--his grandmother--setting precedents for how he will live, manipulating the stage around him.”

However, Wilcox says his ballet doesn’t suggest that all men are ultimately victimized by forces beyond their control.

“I am an optimist,” he proclaims, “a firm believer that I’m a victim of my own outlook. . . . This man (his ballet’s protagonist) chose to look at his life in a way that meant it was not worth living. But he didn’t have to. He could have picked himself up, become a politician, could have tried to change things in the world. Instead, he just gave up.

“I think a lot of how people turn out depends on their outlook. There are some people who have nothing and who can just sit and look at a tree and feel wonderful.”

And the people with nothing who are miserable? “Those people would be unhappy in any case,” he replies. “The person who has little and is unhappy would be unhappy if he had a lot, too. Because those are the kind of people who are never happy with what they have.”

When pressed, Wilcox recognizes that he’s treading on dangerous political, if not choreographic, ground, but he feels dedicated to his contradictory world view that both rebukes and absolves the homeless in Los Angeles.

“Certainly many of those people could pick themselves up and get a job and do something,” he says, “but the circumstances that they find themselves in are basically dictates of society.”

Just how his complicated series of political and philosophical points will be choreographed in “The Rite of Spring” is a task that still challenges him. For now, he knows only that “the dance is not going to be structured. I don’t want anybody to get the feeling that the dancers were taught that step. I want them to be in real-life positions.”

If Wilcox appears to be grappling with modern or even post-modern issues in what he considers “his most adventurous project to date,” he still resists any labeling. To him, “modern dance is the kind of thing you see in high school or college concerts.”

Sure, he says he worries that the ballet-trained company dancers may commit a kind of mutiny: “It’s very unsatisfying for them to do this kind of thing. They’re not going to be able to do the things they’re trained to do--(display) a nice classical line or big leaps.

“Actually, the ballet may rely more on the acting ability of the dancers than structured stamping and stomping,” he says. But the “enthusiasm and excitement” he feels “about this music coupled with the power of the story” will stem the tide of any dancers’ dissatisfaction and also the resistance he expects from what he calls “the white-haired ladies in the audience at Long Beach.

“I’ve never ventured to put so much emotion in a piece before,” he says. “I get chills when I think about it.

“Long Beach Ballet subscribers, our fans you might say, mostly like such things as ‘Giselle,’ ‘The Nutcracker’ and ‘Coppelia.’ And that’s why we do them--that’s what the first part of our program will be: pas de deux from ‘Don Quixote,’ Dvorak (“Songs My Mother Taught Me”) and ‘Harlequinade,’ plus one excerpt from ‘Coppelia.’

“But the second half of the evening is going to be completely different. There’s going to be a lot of people who won’t like it. A lot . . . . “

Not long ago, he acknowledges, he too might have disliked it. “When I was 17 years old, I was a snob--a real classical snob,” he recalls. “If I thought it wasn’t pure ballet that I saw on stage, I would boo. Still, I hope most people leave the ballet blown away.”