Igor Stravinsky was just finishing The Firebird when he envisioned a pagan rite in which “sage elders seated in a circle, watch a young girl dance herself to death.” The artist Nicholas Roerich had a similar vision. The impresario Sergei Diaghilev teamed them up with the young choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) premiered on May 29, 1913, wreaking havoc. Count Harry Kessler described the performance on opening night as “a new kind of wildness, both un-art and art at the same time.” The choreographer George Balanchine thought the score was undanceable, but that hasn’t stopped countless choreographers from taking on the music’s blood and thunder. The late, great Pina Bausch created her Rite of Spring in 1979, and it now comes to New York in a specially assembled company of 36 dancers from 14 African countries. Also on the program is a new work by Germaine Acogny and the former Bausch dancer Malou Airaudo. Their dance offers poetic antidotes to Bausch’s primal question: “How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die?” These performances are part of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels: A Festival. —Laura Jacobs