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

Dance Magazine, Sept, 1995 by Roslyn Sulcas

Both Laban and speech served as models for Forsythe in the creation of Artifact, and both have continued to influence the way he works, even as he constantly looks for other models or systems that can open up new ways to invent movement. Over the last few years he has, much like Merce Cunningham, turned to computers as a way of freeing himself from the autocracy of choreographic decisions: in the first part of the 1992 ALIE/NA(C)TION, the dancers' trajectories and sequences are determined by a program written by Forsythe and dancer David Kern. "If I look back," he says, "I can see these interests already cropping up in my work in 1977, in attempts to substitute dancing for language, or vice versa--one sign for another, in linguistic terms. I wanted to see how the two could suspend and support one another, and that conceptual idea led to my using linguistic models as an analogy for choreography--for example, what would happen to a step when you alter one aspect of its logic, or the conventional planes of orientation? With computers, it's much the same thing, except the infinity of choice goes way beyond your individual capacity to imagine a substitution, and the systems allow the dancers themselves to encounter and engender new possibilities."

The first tangible indication that he could describe or reproduce what he was trying to do with movement came in 1986 with Die Befragung des Robert Scott ("The Interrogation of Robert Scott"), an austere one-act ballet that Forsythe considers the most important artistic development in his early work with Frankfurt Ballet. "I began the ballet with the idea that I mentioned, that you cannot 'do' arabesque, but that we could try, which was a lot of fun, and what the work is all about. You can't pin down the South Pole on a map, and so obviously Robert Scott's arrival there was purely hypothetical--just like doing ballet, where the decision as to whether you have 'arrived' is a subjective one. It's a moment that can't be formulated very well. Actually, it probably can be formulated brilliantly by someone else, but not me! With Scott, the dancers and I began to see that we could actually create a whole vocabulary to describe some of the things that we were doing in enacting this idea. We developed the notion of kinetic isometries, where the dancers tried to register an exterior and interior refraction of movement in their bodies, and proceed according to the 'reading' that they achieved of their own states. Suddenly, mental agility had to be equal to physical agility, and that was really important."

As he was making great strides in Frankfurt, Forsythe was also on the point of showing his mettle to the big-league ballet companies. In 1987 he created both In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated for Paris Opera Ballet and New Sleep for San Francisco Ballet. Both were commissions, both, like Robert Scott, had scores by the young Dutch composer Thom Willems, who was beginning to work steadily with Forsythe, and both received rapturous responses from audiences and critics. It was, however, In the Middle (a second Nureyev commission), that won Forsythe broader repute on an international level. "The most exciting new ballet that I have seen anywhere for a long time," wrote John Percival in the London Times, while the Paris dance press was scarcely able to contain its excitement at what it perceived as a genuine masterpiece in its midst. Capitalizing on the remarkable techniques and personalities of his nine original dancers (Guillem, Isabelle Guerin, Laurent Hilaire, Manuel Legris, Fanny Gaida, and Lionel Delanoe among them), Forsythe pushed their academic schooling beyond its known boundaries in a series of intricate, intense solos and pas de deux, lighting them with moody brilliance, testing the limits of balance, flexibility, agility, and coordination so that the usually decorous dancers looked like panthers and angels at play.