William Forsythe
Born and trained in dance in the United States, William Forsythe built his career in Europe, first as a dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet starting in 1973, then at the head of the Opera Ballet of Frankfurt from 1984 to 2004. The extremely innovative and sometimes disconcerting nature of Forsythe's contemporary pieces should not make us forget that the choreographer is first and foremost a very great connoisseur and reformer of classical dance. Notably using George Balanchine's advances (stretching of gestures, acceleration of the execution speed and so on), William Forsythe was able to renew it by daring unusual enchaînements, brilliantly playing with performance codes. Artifact (1984), In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987) integrated into the much larger ensemble Impressing the Czar (1988), Limbs Theorem (1990) and Quintett (1993) are a few of the flagship pieces in an enormous repertory of more than 100 works. Today, having left the institution to found his own company in 2004 with a smaller number of dancers, these large-format ballets are exclusively performed by prestigious companies such as the ballets of the Opéra de Paris, the Opéra de Lyon and the Royal Ballet of Flanders. In these first years of the twenty-first century, Forsythe's work is increasingly opening up to other artistic mediums with pieces such as Kammer / Kammer (2006), Human Writes (2005), Heterotopia (2006) and a growing propensity for presenting installations that their author defines as "choreographic", although they often do not include any dancers. After In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated and Die Befragung des Robert Scott presented in 1991 in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais de papes and You Made Me a Monster in 2005, William Forsythe returns to the Festival d'Avignon with an installation titled Unwort.
MF, May, 2011.