A Philosophical Forsythe Discusses Dance - William - Brief Article - Interview

Dance Magazine, August, 2001 by Donna Perlmutter

A dance artist on the lecture podium is not your everyday event. But neither is there anything ordinary about William Forsythe, the American expatriate who left these shores for Germany in 1973 and has been director of Ballet Frankfurt since 1984. So when the noted choreographer took up a four-day residence at UCLA this spring, wearing the prestigious mantle of Regents' Lecturer, there was much s ado about something.

At the actual lecture--given midway through an intensive workshop for undergraduate and graduate students in dance, architecture, aerospace, music, physics, world arts and culture--the slightly built, bespectacled Forsythe, in khakis, running shoes, and a white, untucked shirt, held forth. The format, a dialogue with UCLA dance professor David Gere, turned out to be both intellectually illuminating and excitingly spontaneous.

"It's important to divorce yourself from wish," Forsythe said, on the subject of making dances, "because if you eliminate hope, you end fear." His own vision, he added, is less interesting than what develops by chance. And then he launched into an exploration of how performance and scholarship intersect, while also noting that they occupy separate realms. "Academia is a beautiful bubble," he ventured with a smile, "while the professional dance world is a barracuda tank."

But the main thrust of Forsythe's appearance before several hundred people sitting on bleachers came in his deconstruction of classical dance.

"Ballet moves outward like a giant French compass," he said, "It doesn't require procedure, just assemblage." After explaining that ballet choreographers work with a ready-made vocabulary, however, Forsythe went on to show how the language can evolve. "Ballet is a group of helixes, a series of iterations moving in spiral opposition," he said, physically demonstrating how a particular phrase or combination can develop into something contemporary, but still be traced back to the classical model.

For veteran Forsythe-watchers, this, and the video that followed, illustrated where the choreographer's angular, oblique, and quirky movement style comes from.

And so did his workshop students derive much from their experience with him. Freya Vass, an undergraduate in linguistics and cognitive science who has been accepted into UC Irvine's Ph.D. program in dance history and theory, called Forsythe's focus on process "incredible" and was especially impressed by how he could bring all the disparate students together. "He couldn't exactly teach ronds de jambe to a mathematician," she said wryly. But the brilliance of his efforts, she admitted, hit her "the night after it was over ... in the bathtub."

"The whole experience was absolutely astonishing," said Jack Kirven, a dance graduate student. "I had lost the creative spark," he added, "but when Forsythe entered the picture, everything came alive for me. I was out there discovering how geometric concepts were linked to good design. I was buying books on architecture."