One’s reaction to the Joffrey Ballet’s reconstruction of Nijinsky’s original 1913 choreography for Le Sacre du printemps, unveiled in New York during the company’s fall season at City Center, depended to a great extent on one’s expectations. Knowing that the production was being supervised by two Ph.D.s for a dance company not noted as a creative institution, I expected an academic exposition dutifully executed, which is pretty much what I got. And was thrilled to get.

Can any other score have suffered the indignities that have been heaped upon Le Sacre since its demise as a ballet nearly three-quarters of a century ago? Merely to list the names of some of those who have perpetrated their choreography upon it makes one recoil: Maurice Béjart, John Neumeier, Glen Tetley, Hans van Manen, Oscar Araiz, Pina Bausch, Valery Panov . . . .

Notable by his absence is the choreographer most closely associated with Stravinsky.

Notable by his absence is the choreographer most closely associated with Stravinsky. In 1923 the teenaged George Balanchine had unsuccessfully sought permission from the authorities to stage Le Sacre at the Petrograd State Theater of Opera and Ballet. He never expressed interest in it again. In 1952—with the composer’s blessing—Nicolas Nabokov, representing the Congress for Cultural Freedom, tried to get Balanchine to create new choreography for Le Sacre for an arts festival in Paris entitled “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century”—to no avail. In 1975 Robert Craft, reviewing Lincoln Kirstein’s Nijinsky Dancing,