Although the cycle of the seasons is taken for granted by many people, Diaghilev's Rites of Spring captures the sense of desperation that winter may never end and spring never come. February seems the hardest month, despite all the early signs of spring being there if you look for them.
Stravinsky's music conveys the painful contractions of death and rebirth and I imagine it was the music, rather than the choreography, that provoked the Paris audience at its première in May 1913. In this mythic, pagan past there is no certainty, but women and men are in direct relationship with the earth; the ritual dances wake the earth to new life and feed her with their own energy, though only the chosen sacrifice dances him or herself into the realms of death. The narrative seems to foresee the totalitarian era of Stalin, where the individual was second to the collective, as much as resurrect a distant past. Some versions of the ballet use costume inspired by Native American or Aboriginal cultures, equating them with with the dramatic idea of the 'pagan' dreamed up by armchair anthropologists like Frazier in his many volumned Golden Bough.
In the contemporary world our rites are more static. On a day when there is unexpected sunshine and warmth we gather in parks and cafe terraces, and, if lucky, might hear the sound of a distant drum travelling from an open window or passing car.