Revisiting The Rite: The Rite Of Spring Centenary Conference

In a notable scene from Women in Love (1920), D. H. Lawrence draws attention to the popularity of Diaghilev’s enterprise as representative of the avant garde in the arts in contemporary Britain. He describes how, following Hermione’s dinner party, guests perform a dance in the style of the sophisticated Ballets Russes. Elsewhere, Lawrence’s sympathies lay rather with the individualism of free dance that would have been closer to the innovative work of Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan or the natural rhythms of Jaques-Dalcroze’s Eurhythmics. Indeed, Lawrence more often explores dance’s function as individual expression of the body’s liberation from Edwardian inhibition rather than the spectacle of dance as entertainment or performance. On another occasion his fictional evocation of dance draws on an imaginative reconstruction of primitive ritual that uncannily suggests the performance strategies of Diaghilev’s production of the Rite. Lawrence’s short story, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925) on the surface springs fr