William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography

It Starts From Any Point

Steven Spier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136834899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

William Forsythe's reinvigoration of classical ballet during his 20-year tenure at the Ballett Frankfurt saw him lauded as one of the greatest choreographers of the postwar era. His current work with The Forsythe Company has gone even further to challenge and investigate fundamental assumptions about choreography itself.

William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography presents a diverse range of critical writings on his work, with illuminating analysis of his practice from an interdisciplinary perspective. The book also contains insightful working testaments from Forsythe's collaborators, as well as a contribution from the choreographer himself.

With essays covering all aspects of Forsythe's past and current work, readers are provided with an unparalleled view into the creative world of this visionary artist, as well as a comprehensive resource for students, scholars, and practitioners of ballet and contemporary dance today.

1	Watching the Ballett Frankfurt, 1988–2009
	Roslyn Sulcas

Watching from Paris: 1988–1998

I first saw a ballet by William Forsythe in 1988, when the San Francisco Ballet brought New Sleep, commissioned a year previously, on its tour to Paris. I can still remember my sensation of mixed shock and excitement as shiny black-clad dancers with slashing arms picked their way on pointe along diagonals of light while Thom Willems’s music pounded and wailed. It was certainly ballet. Bravura pas de deux and counterpointed ensemble work flashed before my eyes, but in such a radically new context that I could scarcely believe what I was seeing: ballet without quotation marks around the word, as much a part of the contemporary world as film or architecture or quantum physics.

In fact, Forsythe was scarcely unknown at the time. If I had been in France a few years earlier, I might have seen his France/Dance, which Rudolf Nureyev had commissioned for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983. And just one year previously, his In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, to music by Willems, also choreographed for the Paris company, had made of the American-born choreographer a sudden phenomenon – at least in Europe, where he had been working since 1973. But when I saw New Sleep, I didn’t know that the Paris critics had hailed Forsythe as a new Balanchine, nor anything else about him. I simply knew that after years of feeling simultaneously bored by, yet still drawn to ballet, I had seen something that made me want to renew my connection to the art.

In many ways, this article is a direct outcome of that first viewing of New Sleep, since it was wanting to write about Forsythe’s work that led me to a subsequent career as a journalist. Over the decade that has passed since that evening at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, I have watched Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt and his work at every possible opportunity, mostly in Paris, where, serendipitously for me, the company had a second residence at the Théâtre du Châtelet from 1990 to 1998. I have been lucky enough to see almost everything that he has created during this time, as well as having had the opportunity of talking to him frequently about his work. An overview is nonetheless a daunting prospect. Contrary to some critical opinion, Forsythe’s work defies ready categorization. It ranges from neo-classical pieces in a recognizable Balanchinian tradition to wildly theatrical works that incorporate flamboyant mixes of speech, film, video, props, music, dance, and, often, complex technology. All of the work exhibits his genius for lighting. And in addition to the theatrical gifts that are so uniquely his own, Forsythe has extended the vocabulary of dance in a way that goes well beyond the world of ballet, even as he has radically affected the possibilities of that form.

I will touch on a few features of Forsythe’s work that appear to me to be central to what he does, rather than provide a chronological overview or discuss a particular aspect in detail. In fact, thinking about how to approach his work made it clear that while there is certainly a choreographic elaboration to be seen over the last ten years, his work shows surprising consistency in many respects: as a choreographer he seems to have been born full-grown, with a distinctive physical style, compositional sense, and theatrical vision at the outset; even if all of these qualities have become ever more articulated as his craft has evolved.

As difficult as it might be to define or describe Forsythe’s oeuvre, one element nonetheless seems clear to me: that his relationship to ballet is the cornerstone of his work, no matter how far from its precepts he might appear to roam. In earlier works like Artifact or In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, the tension between academic forms and those forms pushed to their extremes is explicit. In more recent pieces like Firstext, Sleepers Guts, Hypothetical Stream II or Small Void, the slippery, dislocated, densely coordinated movement style may initially appear to have little to do with ballet’s formal positions and clear lines, but his dancers’ classically trained bodies hold that clarity and articulation within the movement, keeping ballet as a shimmering, elusive physical presence reference point to which he constantly returns.

Related to this is a second element that is consistently present in Forsythe’s work: a sense of inclusivity. Judging from accounts of his first full-length piece, Orpheus (made for the Stuttgart Ballet, of which he was then a member), Forsythe seems always to have believed that when making a ballet anything was possible, both technically and conceptually. This is a simple idea, but an enormous one. It means that nothing – whether in another field like geography or mathematics or mythology, or the history of dance itself, is out of bounds in the creative process and onstage. Antony Rizzi, a dancer and ballet-master with Ballett Frankfurt who has choreographed several works of his own, once put it simply to me: ‘The most important thing that Billy taught me’, he said, ‘is that anything can go with anything’. This is not to do with references or sources of ideas (many of which often appear in company programs, and can engender either delight or hostility because this appears ‘intellectual’) but to do with the way in which Forsythe refuses to keep the domain of ballet away from other domains. It is a point illustrated in a small way by the incongruously unballetic title of Forsythe’s Herman Schmerman, a phrase taken from a Steve Martin film which now seems perfect for the ballet’s insouciant divertissement charm because the choreographic universe has expanded to incorporate it.

A third element that is clear in Forsythe’s choreography is that the way it looks comes, more obviously than is the case with most choreographers, from his own, very specific kinetic connection to the world. In interviews he has talked about ‘always dancing’ at home, well before he took formal lessons; watching him work, it is clear that he is an instinctively physical person, able to pick up, absorb, and transform movement into a personal idiom, in an uncanny, instinctive, and nearly instantaneous manner. The idiom is fluid, polychromatic, and innately musical, with movement appearing to be generated by the body’s own weight and rhythms. Most notably, Forsythe always gives movement marked dimensionality: no step is ever a flat shape in space; it is always a complex volumetric form, existing in its own time.

But what is in fact most notable about the broad configurations for his oeuvre is that theatrical imagination always marks the pure-dance pieces, whether in the unspoken rivalries that underpin the heart-thumping, off-balance extensions of the In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, the friendly, jazzy teammanship of The Second Detail, or the heart-wrenching dissolving movement that speaks silently of death in Quintett. And choreographic inventiveness always marks the dramatic works; the scrabbling, frantic motions of Part I of Alien/a(c)tion; the sweeping grace of Slingerland; the buckling, shadowy movement that gives corporeal expression to the hallucinatory dream world of The Loss of Small Detail. In all of these, Forsythe shows one of the most important aspects of his art: the ability to create a unified theatrical universe, expressed in part by his choreography, but also through an instinctive capacity to edit, structure, and pace a work. (This is very evident when watching him in the process of making a ballet: on a number of occasions, I have witnessed him change a piece entirely by restructuring and often discarding many of its elements, to immediately greater effect. It always seems like magic, which, like all art at its best, is just what it is.)

This theatrical ability is most apparent in Forsythe’s full-length ballets, where structure, rhythm, and an imaginative world have ample space to reveal themselves. Two of the most interesting evening-length works, Slingerland and Limb’s Theorem, were completed in the same year, when I first saw them. Slingerland, which I only saw a few times during that season, and which is (to my personal regret) no longer in the repertoire, remains for me one of Forsythe’s most poetic and magical ballets, with its post-apocalyptic world of scattered stones, its supernatural fairies of the corps de ballet in tutus that look like crisp, curved potato chips, its Beckettian tramps, and passages in which individuals suspended on harnesses achieve the weightless dream of the dancer, yet float (to mysterious music by Gavin Bryars) in vulnerable limbo, unable to dance without gravity. The brilliant Limb’s Theorem, on the other hand, offers an architectural black and white world in which the dancers are energy-charged atoms in ever-changing configurations of form and matter, bursting into the space like eruptions from the unconscious, infectiously responsive to the light and sound that shape their world.

In both ballets, however, Forsythe demonstrates how ingeniously he is able to shape a work visually and structurally; both ballets are constructed so that different positions in the theatre offer different content, and almost no seat allows a full vantage point. In Limb’s Theorem in particular, the full extent of the off-stage is used. Dancers leaping up against the walls, or a man and woman weaving between long propped-up sticks, and then knocking them over, can only be seen from one side of the auditorium. Both ballets, too, feature architectural forms on stage which frame or shape the dance, and which sometimes seem to change or proliferate as objects may in dreams. (The ability to evoke a dream-like universe in which things have their own bizarre logic and reality is one of Forsythe’s most compelling talents.) Both ballets are also notable for the way in which they make the lighting, created by Forsythe, as integral to the choreography as are the steps. Exploding and contracting the space, filtering across the stage in uneven and transient shafts, bathing the dancers in a concentrated glare or obscuring them with deepening shadows that intensify the ephemeral beauty of the movement, lighting in Forsythe’s hands, in Limb’s Theorem in particular, is suddenly an explicit, onstage element in the visual composition of the work. (The influence of this on contemporary dance choreographers in France was almost immediately perceptible; it is still odd to me not to see it in the United States of America, even if it can be a relief to be spared the more excessive reflections of Forsythe’s work that are sometimes, wrongly, represented as Forsythean style).

All of these elements – theatrical imagination, formal mastery, and lighting as a structural presence – are visible in one of the first ballets that Forsythe made for Ballett Frankfurt after taking up the position of director in 1984. Artifact, which is still in the company’s repertoire, in many ways remains a paradigmatic work. Forsythe showed that he was not simply working with ballet technique in innovative ways, but was also intensely aware of its history as an art form and its potential to go beyond that history. A four-part, full-evening work to piano music by Eva Crossman-Hecht, J.S. Bach, and a sound collage by Forsythe himself, the ballet is centred around three characters: ‘Woman in Historical Costume’, ‘Person with Megaphone’, and a ghostly all-over grey ‘Other Person’, who move like figures from dreams amidst a large corps de ballet of beautifully symmetrical lines and formations. Using a limited range of word choices (l/You, He/She/They, Always/Never, Remember/Forget; See, Hear, Think, Say, Do; Rocks, Dirt, Sand, Soot, Dust), the woman creates apparently endless narratives, starting and stopping the music and the dance by clapping her hands like a repetiteur, while the man with the megaphone and the ghost attempt to communicate by means of different hand and arm signals that are copied by the other dancers at various points; repetitive ensemble sequences such as variations upon tendu with épaulement, a recurring motif in Forsythe’s work to this day, and the arbitrariness and restrictiveness of the text seem analogous to the combinations of steps performed by the dancers.

Sweeping through an extraordinary range of group and individual formations while the lighting renders the dancers successively present and unreal, Artifact sometimes seems like a huge dance processor, chopping up and spitting out bits of Petipa (‘More imperial’, I once heard Forsythe tell the female dancers in rehearsal as they moved in a paired courtly procession down to the front of the stage), Balanchine, Laban, and Bausch. But the ballet is uniquely Forsythean in demonstrating everything that dance had thought it could do in its short theatrical life, and then more. In the pure-dance, second part of the work, to Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, two couples surge unexpectedly from the lines of dancers at the sides and back of the stage, performing simultaneous pas de deux of breathtaking beauty which are brutally interrupted several times by the curtain crashing down (and, lined with wooden battens, it really does crash).

It’s easy to see this strategy as pure provocation – when you first see the work, it is nerve-wracking. (Has something gone wrong? Is someone hurt? What is the audience supposed to do?) But the uninterrupted flow of the gorgeous, melancholy violin, and the renewed vision, flooded with golden light, that the ballet offers each time the curtain goes back up to reveal the dancers, still moving through another exquisite formation, takes Forsythe’s device well beyond the realm of the sensational. And although Artifact makes central the way dance works on stage in relation to the other components of theatrical experience and illusion (lighting, framing, the handling of expectations), it has never seemed to me that the ballet is about this in a purely intellectual way. What Part II of the ballet does do, however, is to provide an early and perfect illustration of a duality that Forsythe juggles with through much of his work: the desire for and capacity to attain beauty, and the resistance to settling for beauty.

This tension is also central to another Forsythe ballet that remains emblematic in his repertoire, the hour-long, complex Die Befragung des Robert Scott, made two years after Artifact. The ambiguities and impossibilities of perfection, or completion, the seeds of dissolution in the dancing body, are contained in a series of solos based on improvisational techniques that Forsythe had been working on with the company. In Robert Scott, the movement takes on a new, particularized quality as the dancers focus on making detailed connections between body parts, their ballet-trained limbs stretching and extending in familiar fashion, then mutating into complex, hard-to-read configurations. Perhaps for the first time, Forsythe saw that he could actually develop a physical language of his own. The working idea for Robert Scott, he later said, was ‘losing your point of orientation’, and he did this well enough also to find a new one. The physical explorations in Robert Scott that had dancers using their bodies in a newly conceived way to create movement set Forsythe (and his dancers) on a choreographic path that he and they had already begun to explore in other ways. They began spending rehearsal time not just making steps, but also talking, drawing, bringing their lives into the dance; not unusual techniques for many contemporary dance companies, but unheard of for a ballet troupe. What is already visible in Artifact – that movement could be question rather than answer, even as it momentarily answers to a longing for perfection – is explicitly articulated in Robert Scott.

Die Befragung des Robert Scott, followed by The Vile Parody of Address, then Slingerland and Limb’s Theorem, offered the Frankfurt dancers chances to explore the liquid, seamless geometries of movement that they could make by applying new techniques that Forsythe was developing in the course of creating these pieces, while continuing to choreograph more balletic pieces like In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated, New Sleep, and Behind the China Dogs for other companies. The most important of these techniques was ‘reading externally’, which Forsythe describes as ‘using your perception, your sight, or sense of touch, to read events … you could look at your fingerprints, or a three-dimensional object, and understand how it functioned as a two-dimensional plan. Then you physically retranslate it back into a three-dimensional event’.¹ But while the details of these techniques are interesting, it is the results and effects they produce that are most important.

Whether or not one knows how the movement was made, the opening moments of Limb’s Theorem are magical – movement born from nothing and then endlessly elaborated in ever-changing variations on themes. The dancers’ bodies appear as polyphonous instruments that can generate movement from any point, rather than taking impetus primarily from the legs or arms around a vertical trunk. A motif of arrangement pervades the dancing: an opening pas de deux has the dancers pulling on another’s bodies into balletic shapes, legs stiff and straight, arms held correctly in classical positions, but ignoring the conventional logic that governs the planes and impulses of steps. Any part of the body appears able to determine momentum and direction in an angled, disjointed, slightly scary solo for the central Enemy figure in Part II as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Credits
• Introduction: The practice of choreography
• 1. Watching the Ballett Frankfurt, 1988–2009
• 2. Of monsters and puppets: William Forsythe’s work after the ‘Robert Scott Complex’
• 3. Splintered encounters: the critical reception to William Forsythe in the United States, 1979–1989
• 4. Nijinsky’s heir: a classical company leads modern dance
• 5. Timbral architectures, aurality’s force: sound and music
• 6. Dancing music: the intermodality of The Forsythe Company
• 7. Choreographic objects
• 8. Decreation: fragmentation and continuity
• 9. Inside the knot that two bodies make
• 10. Aberrations of gravity
• 11. The space of memory: William Forsythe’s ballets
• 12. Choreographic thinking and amateur bodies
• Alphabetical list of works
• Chronological list of works
• Index