The Rite of Spring

In a primitive, pagan Russia, a tribe gathers on a sacred hillside to celebrate the arrival of spring through a series of ancestral rites — divination, courtship games, processions, and ecstatic dancing that bind the community to the earth. As night falls, the tribe's young women perform a mystic ritual from which one of them is singled out by fate as the chosen sacrificial victim. Elders and ancestors ritually consecrate her, and in the ballet's climax she dances alone with mounting frenzy until she collapses and dies, her death offered to propitiate the god of spring and ensure the community's renewal.