For choreographers, The Rite of Spring has become a rite of passage. Since the first, fabled, production of the ballet by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1913, Stravinsky’s radical score has posed a challenge to generations of dance artists. It invites them to pitch themselves into its ferocious, propulsive rhythms and attempt to hold their own. If successive re-stagings of the work can sometimes seem to be a contest for dominance between dancers and the composer, in the case of Fabulous Beast’s new version, Stravinsky’s position as supreme innovator remains unthreatened.

Leaving aside the celebrated versions from the past - by Nijinsky originally for the Paris premiere, then Leonide Massine and Kenneth MacMillan - there have been many impressive Rites in recent decades: Pina Bausch’s cauldron of untamed energy; Michael Clarke’s Mmm; Stephen Petronio’s The Rite Part; Klaus Obermaier’s interactive version with one dancer, Julia Mach, an orchestra, and some highly inventive technology. For even the most confident choreographer, this might be a daunting commission, yet one that would be hard to resist.

The thematic reasons for English National Opera to embark on a co-production with Fabulous Beast are not hard to fathom: choreographer and director Michael Keegan-Dolan’s work to date has offered contemporary Irish interpretations of mythic themes, especially in Giselle, The Bull and James Son of James – his ‘midlands trilogy’, which blended performance genres and disciplines. Stravinsky’s scenario of a dance to death of a young woman in order to propitiate the god of spring chimes with this choreographer’s preoccupation with violent ritual, sacrifice and the primal impulses that defy forces of socialisation and repression.

Perhaps the fit was almost too neat, leaving Keegan-Dolan with little room to say more than the extraordinary score already expresses; or maybe, just as his recent dance-theatre pieces lacked the input of a dramaturg, he is in need of an impressario figure as inspiring as Diaghilev had been, looking over his shoulder and always driving towards the new. This is a short, intensely concentrated work that should be shattering in its urgency, yet somewhere between the striking opening in which Olwen Fouéré as the archetypal Cailleach (hag) strides across the bare stage in a loop of cigarette smoke, and the climactic frenzy of Daphne Strothmann as The Chosen One (the woman chosen for sacrifice), the sense of focus and purpose gets diluted, as if the company simply ran out of material to fill the dense aural textures.

Keegan-Dolan has used the energy of the mass ensemble in the past, to powerful effect, but here his ensemble of bearded rural Irish lads seem rooted to the spot, their connection to the earth expressed through a physical vocabulary that involves repetitive stomping and arm-thrusting, interspersed with bursts of running. The tribal and telluric are emphasised, inevitably, but this translates into a very limited, almost martial, repertoire of movements, as if the choreography had to match Stravinsky’s insistent rhythms beat for beat.
Rather than reflecting the narrative arc of the piece as it builds towards the violent end, the ensemble present a series of scenes, or sketches, designed by Rae Smith with loose references to an emblematic rural Irish setting, sometime in recent decades. (Young women in print dresses, on bicycles, with cups of tea; men in identical, blocky, quilted jackets and boots.) Eighteen male dancers cluster as a herd, first brandishing daggers, then donning dog-masks and running as a pack as they threaten the local women (who wear hares’ heads, naturally). Whatever about the extreme literalness of the hounds and hares imagery, its impact is undermined by the masks’ lack of menace: these animal heads could have come straight from a comic scene with the Rude Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Primal sexual forces inherent in this work, which is essentially a fertility rite, are made explicit here, with the bare-chested men humping the earth furiously in unison at one point, under the gaze of the statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s a reductive approach to the ambiguous symbolism of ritual, and one that becomes more heavy-handed as Keegan-Dolan attempts to blur the gender stereotypes he has set up.

Embracing the feminine principle, or possibly just getting confused, the men strip naked and change into bright floral dresses, continuing to stomp, but more mutedly. Luckily, the final sequence, danced with furious athleticism by Daphne Strothmann, redeems this scene from banality and bathos. This dancer dazzled in Fabulous Beast’s production of Giselle in 2003. Here her capacity to convey the sense of an embodied spirit, transported and empowered at the same time, captures the depth of Stravinsky’s final danse sacrale.

Helen Meany is the editor of Irish Theatre Magazine.