Sacre/ilège(s) is a collective international video dance collage initiated by the Company Body Cinéma/InternationalVideo Dance Festival of Burgundy (France) in honor of the centenary of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), Nijinsky and Stravinsky’s legendary experimental creation that changed the history of music and dance.

Since 1913, the original ballet has been re-imagined for the stage in hundreds of different versions around the world, its striking universal themes of life cycles and sacrifice at the core of its international resonance. However, few, screendance explorations of the legendary piece exist. Recently, Franck Boulègue & Marisa C. Hayes (Body Cinéma & festival directors) were artists in residence at Tanzhaus nrw in Dusseldorf, Germany, where their research centered on Le Sacre du Printemps. Initially interested in creating their own dance film of the piece, the pair decided instead to honor the centenary by developing an international collective project, echoing Le Sacre du Printemp’s wide sphere of influence internationally. Working with a digitally rendered composition of Stravinsky’s music provided by the Vienna Symphonic Library (Austria), they divided the score into thirteen different portions. They then invited international artists to create a work of video dance to one musical selection. Edited together, these diverse videos create a complete version in collage format of Le Sacre du Printemps. The call for participation resulted in videos received by 65 different artists from over 22 different countries, creating five full versions of the collage. The project celebrates the centenary while ushering Le Sacre du Printemps into  a new era by using contemporary tools to re-explore its legendary musical composition and archetypal themes.  Sacre/ilège: The collage project’s title is evocative of both the original ballet’s name and the word “sacrilege”: not intended as an offensive term, but to signify the ballet’s constant evolution and ability to be re-explored and re-imagined in ways quite different from the original. Nevertheless, the inclusion of “Sacre” also pays tribute to the inspiration of the original work and the timeless themes that many artists continue to explore in the piece today.