William Forsythe

William Forsythe was born in New York City in 1949. After studying dance at Jacksonville University and the Joffrey Ballet School he came to the Stuttgarter Ballett as a dancer in 1973. This was where he developed his first choreography "Urlicht", a duet to the music of Gustav Mahler. Other works for the Stuttgarter Ballett were "Flore subsimplici" in 1978 and "Love Songs" in 1979. In 1983 Forsythe choreographed the piece "Gänge" with the company of the Ballett Frankfurt; he was appointed director of this Ballet in 1984 and he continues to direct it today. Important works from this time include: "Artifact" 1984, "Impressing the Czar" 1988, "Limb's Theorem" 1991, "The loss of small Detail" 1991, "Alie/naction" 1992, "Eidos:Telos" 1995, "Endless House" 1999, "Kammer/Kammer" 2000. Since October 1999 Forsythe has also been director of the TAT in the Bockenheimer Depot, the second venue of the Ballett Frankfurt.

With the season 2004/2005 the Ballet Frankfurt, after having separated from the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, is continued as The Forsythe Company under the direction of William Forsythe.

In 1994, Forsythe virtually reinvented the teaching of dance with his computer application “Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye” (Hatje Cantz Publishing House), which is used worldwide by professional companies, dance conservatories, universities, postgraduate architecture programmes and secondary schools. Currently, Forsythe is developing an online interactive project expanding on the initiative begun with “Improvisation Technologies” by offering an interdisciplinary educational platform focussed on the inherent knowledge of choreo-graphic techniques and structure.


Artist Statement

Which issues inspire your artistic work?
Every work is unique and each work has a particular proposition. My big question is: will this work, and to what degree will it work? And I of course have to define what the term “work” means – how does it function, in what sense, what is it trying to accomplish – it could be any number of things. But each one is hypothetical in some way. There is no empirical proof that it is functioning. I think indeterminacy is important. So a big question is: what is the nature of indeterminacy, and of the indeterminacy in each production?

How would you describe the artistic language in which your productions are created?
I’m interested in the politics of responsibility.

Under which conditions and with what forms of collaboration are your productions created?
I look for situations that allow dancers to assume responsibility – they are responsible for aspects of the choreography just as I am responsible for the mode of deriving it. I make a proposal and I understand that this proposal can generate a certain kind of information just depending on what your references are.
William Forsythe


Portrait

Fundamentally, the base of Forsythe's work - at least the technique upon which it is based - always remains classical. Forsythe does not collage any scenes, much rather he develops movement and he won't have anything to do with the bare sole as a means of artistic expression. Over the years he has created his own canon of movement, which is based on straddling steps thrust out of the pelvis, unnatural angular poses and pixie-like jumps exploding on all sides, with mad acceleration. It would certainly not be wrong to call Forsythe a renewer, reformer of classical ballet. But a classification of this kind would be too constricting. A word from the Head of the Zurich Ballet, Heinz Spoerli, is probably most apt, who said that for him at the moment Forsythe is "the man who brings the classical tradition closest to the nerve of the times". It is certainly also true that the statement that with his choreographies in the 1980 Forsythe thoroughly surveyed the ground of what had to be worked on and, where possible, reformed. Before Forsythe decided what could be used for his work from the offer of classical ballet, he subjected it to thorough investigation. For Forsythe this analysis of his own mιtier, the conditions and requirements of his own work, its history and aesthetics was more than just a pillar of his work in the 1980s. Since he has been working in Frankfurt he has become set on reflecting the requirements of classical dance in his pieces. From the "Gδngen" of 1982 to the major, full-evening pieces of the 1990s - "Limb's Theorem", "Slingerland" (both 1990), "Alie/naction" (1992), "As a garden in this setting" (1993), "Eidos: Telos" (1994) - a single, broad-based research into ballet, from which the outlines of a new, non-classical to anti-classical aesthetics have emerged. / Jochen Schmidt


Works

Dance Productions:
The Defenders (2007)
Angoloscuro (2007)
Heterotopia (2006)
Three Atmospheric Studies (2005/06)
You made me a monster (2005)
Human Writes (2005)
Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time (2005)
Decreation (2003)
Kammer/Kammer (2000)

Installations:
Additive Inverse (2007)
Antipodes 1/2 (2006)
Thematic Variations über One Flat Thing, Reproduced (2006) film by Thierry De Mey
Monster Partitur (after You made me a monster) (2005/06)
Scattered Crowd (2002) / City of Abstracts (2000)
White Bouncy Castle (1999)