Ballet's The Rite of Spring, 100 years later

When The Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris in 1913, it created the most violent brouhaha in ballet history, with critics condemning Igor Stravinsky's music as barbarous and Vaslav Nijinsky's choreography as senseless ugliness.

One hundred years on, the original dance material may be lost, but Rite has become one of the most choreographed scores in existence. It was danced solo by American choreographer Molissa Fenley in 1988, and by 250 Berlin teenagers in a 2003 version by Royston Maldoom. It has been interpreted as a savage biological battle of the sexes by Pina Bausch, and as a luminous 3-D spectacle by Klaus Obermaier.

Stravinsky's score is now, as Michael Keegan-Dolan says, dryly, "a rite of passage in itself".

The Irish choreographer's 2009 version will feature in a season of Rite-inspired dances, entitled "A String of Rites", at Sadler's Wells; as will community dance project Riot Offspring, which will see 80 non-professionals take to the stage; while the Akram Khan Company will perform iTMOi ( In the Mind of Igor).

Keegan-Dolan speaks for many when he says it's not just the music's notoriety that lures choreographers. "There's a whole education in there. If you use your imagination, it takes you back to 1913. You're in the world of Stravinsky, [original designer Nicholas] Roerich and Nijinsky. You're in that room with all the boys when everything was changing so fast. Afterwards, you come out more fully realised as a choreographer."

Those "boys" certainly made history on May 29, 1913. Discarding the romanticism, glamour and faux exoticism that were ballet's traditional selling points, Rite's creators channelled a new world for the dance stage - one in which men and women could be crushed by the forces of nature, and an innocent girl brutally sacrificed to callous gods.

What made this doubly shocking to its audience was the modernity of its language. Stravinsky's score might have been based on the music of folkloric tradition, but it twisted and compressed its sources into searing shapes and sounds. Rhythms splintered and collided, harmonies clashed, instruments played in pulsing, shrieking registers. If this was an evocation of spring, it was no gentle pastoral, but a season of cracking ice, violent wind and burning sun.