The crowd at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the evening of May 29, 1913, was expecting something big.
The newest theater in Paris was already renowned for fashion and daring.
Its gutsy founder, journalist and impresario Gabriel Astruc, had scored a coup when he landed the 1913 season of the Ballets Russes, which had wowed Parisians since 1908 with scintillating works that combined Europe's most imaginative young dancers, composers, choreographers and artists..
The lights dimmed. Conductor Pierre Monteux raised his baton. And everyone heard an otherworldly melody.
Things got stranger when the dancers appeared.
The choreography – turned-in feet, repetitive stomping, endless circles – seemed to mock the foundations of ballet.
The uproar began immediately. Shouts, hisses and whistles threatened to drown out the orchestra. The police were called. And Western culture was never the same.
“The Rite of Spring,” one century after its premiere, is acknowledged as a tipping point when the old, for better or worse, gave way to the new.
In Southern California, celebrations throughout 2013 commemorate and analyze a ballet that retains the stark and visceral modernism that it engendered.
- Football playoffs: The fun, fans and emotions from Saturday's championship games
- Dozens of victims still not accounted for after warehouse fire in Oakland
- VIDEO: Annual Candlelight Ceremony signals Christmas at Disneyland
- Man suspected in death of Huntington Beach woman is arrested in Oregon
- Pearl Harbor survivors fear we are forgetting the story of that fateful day