My review of the world premiere of the Carolina Performing Arts-commisioned A Rite, by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and the SITI Company,  was published 1/28/13 in CVNC.org.

A Rite, at its Chapel Hill, NC, premiere, 1/26/13, CPA. Photo: Paul B. Goode.

In a year so replete with good stuff, including twelve commissioned works, as Carolina Performing Arts’  2012-13 season, one could start to feel overwhelmed. And one could start to get really tired of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the focus of CPA’s series within a series examining that era-changing work from many points of view. However, that’s not happening. Instead, each new performance increases interest in that complex music, the dance that accompanied it—and the ones that have followed—and the ideas that swirl around them. On January 26, (delayed one day by icy weather) CPA presented in Memorial Hall what may be the most intellectually important of its dozen commissions this year, A Rite, a collaborative production of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company, headed by Anne Bogart. This brawny baby was three years from conception to premiere.

“Dactors” on the Memorial Hall stage for the premiere of A RITE. Photo: Paul B. Goode.

Bill T. Jones has moved further and further into dance theater over the years. While he has an unerring sense of spectacle, I have never felt his command of theater idiom equaled his command of dance. Working with Anne Bogart and the highly physical SITI Company, as well as his associate artistic director Janet Wong, Jones and his company have found a much stronger theatrical voice….

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The academic character modeled on UNC Professor Severine Neff rides the piano in A RITE. Photo: Paul B. Goode.