Dance de/reconstructed: the William Forsythe legacy

Just what is modern dance? What is its vocabulary, what are its rules? Where do its limitations lie – if at all? And how does dance relate to other disciplines, other ways of thinking – indeed, how does it relate to the rest of life?

Some choreographers try for perfection in their craft and their art; they value balance, elegance, fluidity. For William Forsythe that was never enough: “to reduce choreography to a single denotation is to not understand the most crucial of its mechanisms – to resist and reform previous definitions”. He doesn’t push boundaries so much as smash them down and see if there are any new ones (there probably aren’t).

It was his directorship of Frankfurt Ballet, from 1984 to 2002, that put William Forsythe (right) on the international dance map. Before that he’d danced with New York companies, notably the Joffrey Ballet, and from 1973 he had been resident choreographer at Stuttgart Ballet in German. But at Frankfurt he really made his name with a series of pieces that sought to deconstruct (some would say subvert) traditional ballet, often with deliberately disorientating multimedia stagings that were closer to experimental theatre.

Eventually his employers decided they had had enough and tried to force him out; they wanted more of what the world usually regarded as ‘ballet’ (“Forsythe should get his nose out of Derrida and start tending his tendus … pretentious as hell” opined one late-90s review) and Forsythe was unwilling to serve up dance as what he termed a “fine dining experience”.

So in 2005 he set up The Forsythe Company (ten years later it changed its name to Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company when Jacopo Godani was appointed Artistic Director).

“Choreography is a curious and deceptive concept,” Forsythe wrote. “The word itself, like the processes it describes, is elusive, agile, and maddeningly unmanageable.” Forsythe accepts that ballet is like a language, in that it has developed a vocabulary and a grammar – rules of correct usage, as it were. But he’s much more interested in breaking those rules to find out what dance really is.

As he put it in a 2007 interview: “If dance only does what we assume it can do, it will expire. I keep trying to test the limits of what the word choreography means”. And elsewhere: “If dance only does what we assume it can do, it will expire”.

As well as messing with the conventions of dance, he is no slave to expectations of how ballet should be staged. Many of his pieces are danced traditionally on pointe, but he has also used workboots, socks and slippers in order to explore different choreographic results. Dancers might talk, the curtain might raise or lower in the middle of a piece, the lighting might be too murky or too fierce; and some of those decisions will be the dancer’s – an important element of his approach to choreography is allowing the dancers to make choices about order and timing comparable to those made by musicians playing a cadenza.

It’s not to everyone’s taste, but then that’s probably how Forsythe wants it. But even his critics would concede that his interdisciplinary invention has radically expanded the scope of dance and the range of possibilities that dance can encompass – though they might not use such polite language.

Certainly he has been inventive, prolific and influential. His thinking has changed how dance can be created, experienced, and presented – probably for ever. Forsythe’s choreographic works have been performed in the repertories of virtually every major dance company in the world for four decades, including the Paris Opera Ballet, La Scala, Netherlands Dans Theater, National Ballet of Canada, English National Ballet, Semper Oper Ballet Dresden, Sadlers Wells in London, New York City Ballet, Boston Ballet, and San Francisco Ballet.

It’s not just in the nature of performance that he has been so vital; Forsythe hasn’t been shy about looking for new ideas in content, and how dance might work in dialogue with other fields – architecture, advanced mathematics, philosophy, technology. Research and application of ideas in areas like those are often a part of his choreographic process.

Often these are pitched as installation works rather than standard dance programmes (Forsythe calls them ‘Choreographic Objects’); he’s been a regular at the Venice Biennale with these (2005, 2009, 2012, 2014) but has also performed at the likes of the Whitney Biennial, the Louvre, Tate Modern and MoMA. He has collaborated with architect Daniel Liebeskind, with Law professor Kendall Thomas, and on the intersection of dance, physics, and digital composition with Joel Ryan.

Forsythe has called the Choreographic Objects “modelled abstractions” – “no matter how diverse the scale and nature of these projects have been, they all strive to give viewers an unadorned sense of their own physical self-image and to return the analysis of kinetic phenomena that was previously the exclusive purview of professionals to a platform that speaks clearly to the nonspecialist”.

He’s sufficiently rigorous in his views to produce to have developed new approaches to dance documentation, research, and education, usually In collaboration with media specialists and educators. As long ago as 1994 he produced a computer-based application on Improvisation Technologies, still widely used as a teaching tool. 2009 marked the launch of Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, a digital online score developed with The Ohio State University that reveals the organisational principles of the choreography and demonstrates their possible application within other disciplines. Synchronous Objects was the pilot project for Forsythe’s Motion Bank, a research platform focused on the creation and research of online digital scores in collaboration with guest choreographers.

So what are these embodied methodologies and philosophies? How were they developed? How can they be applied? How can they work in practice?

The American-born Amsterdam-based choreographer, dancer and educator Michael Schumacher (right) should probably know. He’s been a member of several groundbreaking companies, including Twyla Tharp Dance, Feld Ballet, Pretty Ugly Dance Company, and Magpie Music Dance Company (no relation)., Schumacher was also a member of Forsythe’s Ballet Frankfurt company and is a prime example of the ‘Forsythe lineage’ of dancer-collaborators who have developed a style of experimenting with improvisational methodologies. Schumacher should be well qualified to share first-hand insights into Forsythe’s way of working (and thinking).

He’s in town next week for a three-day Choreographic Lab with local dancers at Sharjah Performing Arts Academy, a collaboration with the Goethe Institute and Foundation Forsythe. While here he’s also taking the opportunity for two public discussion sessions under the title What Might Choreographic Thinking Look Like? Schumacher will be in conversation with performing arts curator Beata Stankevic for these lecture/performances:

• 21 November 5.15-6:45pm at Sharjah Performing Arts Academy (SPAA)
• 22 November 6.30-8pm at Berklee Abu Dhabi

Tickets are free but should be prebooked.

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