An extreme experience: a man and a woman nearly breathe the life out of each other. This is how French choreographer David Wampach opens up a new perspective on Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring in his latest piece SACRE. Together with dancer Tamar Shelef he exhausts himself on stage in the process. Only traces are left of the original. Some patterns of movement and a few notes of Stravinsky’s music. In a minimalist setting, with a grotesque and eerie touch, Wampach and Shelef work with hyperventilation so excessively that even the audience nearly lose their breath.

“Taking the mind and not literally, David Wampach creates a Rite, reduced to a duo, probably more powerful and close to the original that most apostles of the spring. In their simple costumes that recall the painter, decorator and author of the argument of The Rite of origin, Nicolas Roerich, they slide down the steep and smooth sides of the decor, almost as twins. Avoiding the usual musical passion, only two muted notes (at the beginning and end) lead to the thundering collapse of Stravinsky. Hectic rush and sacrificial exhaustion are left to the performers’ breath. It is both grand and impressive, almost addictive and disturbing, because what could be more communicative and more viscerally incorporated than panting ? What could be more frightening than an “out of breath” when the air may always be insufficient? And what is more tenuous and more frantic that the passage from life to death held from first to last breath? Tamar Shelef and David Wampach, the two protagonists of this duet are simply … amazing! ”
Agnes Izrine • Danser Magazine, September 2011