Channels for the desire to dance - Frankfurt Ballet director William Forsythe

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1995 by Roslyn Sulcas

Perhaps the most striking thing about the ballets of William Forsythe is the way these works make classical dance seem as valid and exploratory a form of contemporary art as any other style of movement. American-born Forsythe, who has directed Frankfurt Ballet since 1984, has works in the repertoires of most of the world's major ballet companies, among them Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, New York City Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Royal Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, and Royal Swedish Ballet. Forsythe's remarkable capacity to rethink and reinvigorate the language of classical dance is shown in such works as In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated; New Sleep; Herman Schmerman; and the second detail. Though his choreography today goes well beyond the structured confines of ballet, he continues to work with classically trained dancers, involving them in a collaborative approach to choreography that looks anew at such conventions as turnout, placement, verticality, balance, and spatial orientation.

In Forsythe's work movement itself is the subject--movement deconstructed and reassembled in conjunction with a distinctive theatrical aesthetic that combines speech and film, silence and stasis, amplified sound and mesmerizing lighting. Ballet technique echos and resonates under the skin of the dance.

His combination of technical innovation and intellectual inquiry has won Forsythe a particularly appreciative following in Europe, where he has been based since he left his first job at Joffrey Ballet to join Stuttgart Ballet in 1973. In France Frankfurt Ballet holds an official second residence at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris, where it plays to a large, fervent following that delights in exploration. Such mass encouragement of trailblazing by an established company is rare in the United States.

The cultural differences on each side of the Atlantic were highlighted at UNited We Dance, the international festival hosted by San Francisco Ballet last spring. SFB artistic director Helgi Tomasson, who had commissioned New Sleep from Forsythe in 1987, expressed astonishment at how pervasive his influence was on many ballets performed by the European companies. "For me, that has been one of the revelations of the festival," says Tomasson. "New Sleep is a great success here, but I don't get the sense that people have been fundamentally affected by his work in the same way in the States."

That Forsythe's work has been in some sense less culturally suited to his native country than to Europe is a curious irony, given that his early artistic preferences were very American indeed. Born in Manhasset on Long Island in 1949, he grew up "wanting to be in musicals, which I choreographed--the kind of stuff you do in high school. I have always danced--I learned to dance by myself. I used to watch Fred Astaire on television and then spend my afternoons practicing rock 'n' roll in the kitchen, holding onto the refrigerator. Dancing in America is a really important part of the culture--you see it in the way we move--the way we dance, play music a lot. The biggest factor for me was American musical culture, and I'm glad that I learned ballet afterward--in that way, the other stuff could filter into it."

Formal dance training began later while majoring in drama ("I knew that I wanted to go on the stage") at Jacksonville University in Florida. He was subsequently awarded a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet School (where he studied with Maggie Black and Finis Jhung), performed with its parent company, and was the last dancer to be hired for John Cranko's Stuttgart Ballet before the director's untimely death in 1973.

Marcia Haydee, who took over as artistic director after a brief incumbency by Glen Tetley, continued Cranko's policy of nurturing creative talent within the company. (Aspiring choreographers who had already been given first starts in Stuttgart included John Neumeier, Uwe Scholz, and Jiri Kylian.) Forsythe made his first piece, a lyrical pas de deux called Urlicht (to Mahler), for the Noverre Society Young Choreographers Workshop in 1976, and saw it enter the company's repertoire the following year. Appointed resident choreographer by Haydee, Forsythe made a number of works in quick succession for the company, largely concerned, he says, "with reusing dance language that everyone knows, but in a different manner, a different order."

Stuttgart brought a Forsythe program to New York City in 1979, but it was with Say Bye Bye, made for Netherlands Dance Theater in 1980 and presented in New York City on a 1982 NDT tour, that the already distinctive theatrical and technical characteristics of Forsythe's work began to be remarked upon more widely. Like Love Songs and Square Deal, which he staged for Joffrey Ballet the following year, Say Bye Bye drew upon popular culture in its use of speech, lighting, and music; set classical dance in an unexpected context; and wreaked havoc on viewer expectations. All three works drew alternating salvos of critical praise and disapprobation for the technical and emotional limits to which Forsythe pushed the dancers, and for their evocation of violence and disintegration--divergently interpreted as the choreographer's violence to the viewer's sensibilities and classical dance itself, or as prescient social commentary that deployed the tools of the culture it condemned.