Michelle Potter talks to William Forsythe on the eve of the company's first visit to the Australia in 1994.
Talking to William Forsythe, artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet since 1984, you can’t help but be impressed by his affable manner, and by his enthusiasm for his work and his dancers. “I have absolutely always wanted to choreograph,” he stresses. “I enjoy it. I love it.” And of his forthcoming visit to Australia for the 1994 Festival of Arts he says: “It is primarily a pleasure to show our work in Australia. We are very proud of it.”
But the man who rides his bike home from the theatre each night, who has kids, who watches TV, who does “everything like everyone else” has caused something of a stir in the dance community. Writers around the world have described him as a cult figure and as the hottest figure in town. His evenings of ballet frequently inspire standing ovations. His works appear in the repertories of the Paris Opera, Netherlands Dance Theatre, Joffrey Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, and the New York City Ballet. The French are so impressed with his company that in 1990 they signed up Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet to work and tour in France every year until 1995.
Forsythe’s work has also divided critical opinion. While some have hailed him as the man who is transforming and extending the classical vocabulary into something contemporary, exciting and thrilling both to watch and perform, others find his work irritating and excessively concerned with philosophical inquiry and expanding the range of possibilities in too many areas. Some have gone so far as to wonder whether he is really very interested in dance at all since his work has evolved from an eclectic range of interests including cultural philosophy, literature, science and information technology. Forsythe maintains unequivocally that he is not redefining the classical vocabulary.
“You can’t redefine it,” he says. “The classical vocabulary is a definition of the body in a certain state. The classical body is, by default, automatically an historical body. It’s not anything else.
“We’re developing a new vocabulary. We’re taking ballet and affecting it with our own vocabulary. My purpose is research. What can the body dance?”
Forsythe’s new vocabulary is instantly recognisable since he has taken the rather dramatic step of denying the vertical axis as the defining characteristic of the balletic idiom. He has released the hips and torso from their classical relationship, and the legs, arms and most other parts of the body can be flung out of their usual alignment.
To a classically trained eye, this may generate a slight feeling of discomfort. A movement like an arabesque, for instance, seems to become confused with a movement a la seconde, and vice versa. But the steps seem bigger, wider, filling the space in all directions. The look is often precarious, off-balance, tilted and dangerous. Action may emanate from unexpected parts of the body, such as the shoulder, hip or elbow.
This is not to say that Forsythe has removed the vertical axis entirely from his choreography. Large sections in many of his works actually look quite classical in the commonly understood sense of term as applied to ballet. And when Forsythe does revert to a centred look after an off-centre sequence the effect is remarkable. The eye sees with fresh insight.
But if Forsythe suggests through his choreography that we can reconsider what ballet looks like, he also is keen for us to re-examine what constitutes a theatrical performance. His pieces, The Vile Parody of Address and Steptext for example, often begin before the audience has entered the auditorium. The house lights do not always dim at the expected times and stage lighting often shines into the auditorium. Such audience-confronting techniques Forsythe sees simply as an examination of our established expectations. “It is a very direct analysis of the procedure of theatre,” he explains. “Now you sit down, now the doors close, the lights go down, the lights go up on the other side of the theatre. I just put those analog events slightly out of sync.”
His analysis of performance also extends beyond procedural matters to how we perceive what during a performance. Lighting often alternates between brilliance and a gloom that makes it almost impossible to see the dancers. Clearly this can be irritating for audiences, particularly ballet audiences who are used to having lighting that illuminates the action.
Then there is the famous, or infamous depending on our point of view, second section of Artifact, when the audience’s view is cut off entirely when the fire curtain is lowered at various points during the performance, only to be raised several seconds later to display the piece at a new moment in its development. Such techniques deny the notion that the ideal view of the stage and the performance is an impaired one, and by extension that there is an ideal view. They also suggest that what we can’t see hasn’t necessarily disappeared, a notion that Forsythe described to English critic Roslyn Sulcas in Dance Theatre Journal in 1991 as “the poetry of disappearance”.
Forsythe’s sources of inspiration for his experiments with vocabulary, perception and theatrical procedure are many and varied. He mentions the impact James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake had upon his explorations into an expanded movement vocabulary. “Finnegan’s Wake moves in so many different directions through language, and has so many internal, in-between states,” he says. But he is also affected by such things as virtual reality, the idea of fractal movement analysis and the writings of Roland Barthes. He has frequently spoken of his interest in European literary and cultural philosophers including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.
In the light of these intellectual interests, especially his interest in the way language and its structure carry meaning, it is not surprising that verbal text is used in many of Forsythe’s works. Often the text is used to address, once again, issues of perception. Characters in Artifact persistently ask a series of questions including “Can you see what I’m thinking?” and “What do you think I mean?”. They also confront the audience with a number of statements like “We’ve forgotten the story about you” and “I think I saw you”. The text is most often fragmented without any obvious linear sequence. In some works it is hard to hear the words, just as it is sometimes hard to see the dancers. When you do make out the words it is not always clear what they mean anyway. The Vile Parody of Address, for example, closes with the enigmatic remark: “Despite what I keep saying, one beautiful thing.”
It is sometimes irritating when you can’t make out or make sense of the text, when you can’t see the dancers, even if you know that these are deliberate techniques with a specific purpose. Nor are all Forsythe’s techniques and approaches totally new or unique to him. But what is so startling about Forsythe is that his experiments take place within the medium of ballet. His dancers all take regular classical class each day.
“This is a ballet company,” Forsythe says firmly. “This is what ballet looks like in Frankfurt in the nineties.”
Not many contemporary choreographers have chosen to work in a medium that, to many others, has seemed unable to extract itself from the constraints of its historical framework and vocabulary. Even fewer have had the temerity to question the medium in the way that Forsythe has. If he is not redefining the classical vocabulary, is he then redefining what we understand by ballet? Does ballet have to be classical ballet? What makes a vocabulary balletic now that Forsythe has suggested that it doesn’t have to be the existence of the central and vertical axis? Is the vertical axis the technical heart of the medium?
Whether we like the way he does it or not, Forsythe’s work is at the centre of a debate about what constitutes ballet. Debate is critical for the continued growth of any art form and ballet has too often been without it.
This article was first published in the Feb/Mar 1994 issue of 'Dance Australia'.