When Sergei Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes premiered The Rite of Spring, or Le Sacre du printemps, at Paris's Theatre des Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1913, a riot broke out. The score by Igor Stravinsky was a panoply of shifting syncopations and dissonant harmonies, while the choreography by famed danseur Vaslav Nijinsky curled the dancers' bodies inward as they jerkily stamped and jumped across the stage. Archaeologist and painter Nicholas Roerich contributed the set design and the costumes, which were described in a 2002 Ballet Magazine article as "heavy smocks, handpainted with [primitive] symbols of circles and squares." The pre-Modernist audience, accustomed to the demure grace of classical ballet, was further outraged by the graphic nature of the ballet's story—the pagan sacrifice of a virgin by her village to usher in spring. Nijinsky's ballet was performed only seven more times—in Paris and London—before disappearing from the classical repertoire for reasons including Nijinsky's mental breakdown and the deterioration of his relationship with Diaghilev.

Many new iterations of the ballet were choreographed—including versions by Pina Bausch and Martha Graham—but only the score remained intact from the initial performances. In 1987, the Joffrey Ballet received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to support “the reconstruction of Vaslav Nijinsky's Le Sacre du printemps." The reconstruction was the culmination of more than 15 years of work by Millicent Hodson, a choreographer and dance historian, and her husband Kenneth Archer, an art historian. Hodson and Archer had painstakingly pieced the ballet together from prompt books, contemporary sketches, paintings, photographs, reviews, the original costume designs, annotated scores, and interviews with eyewitnesses, such as Dame Marie Rambert, Nijinsky's assistant.

Given the innovation of Nijinsky's The Rite of Spring, it was fitting that it would be resurrected by the equally innovative Joffrey Ballet. Founded in 1956 by Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino, the company's groundbreaking repertory of original works quickly distinguished it from its contemporaries. Joffrey actually had considered staging Nijinsky's version since the mid-1950s, when he had lived with Rambert while on tour in England. The Joffrey Ballet premiered The Rite of Spring in Los Angeles on September 30, 1987. The Los Angeles Times raved, "One had to applaud the impeccable continuity and dynamic logic of Nijinsky's choreography as pieced together by Hodson. One had to be grateful to Joffrey for taking us on this fascinating trip through a dark time tunnel."