The career of William Forsythe, the prolific dancer and choreographer from New York, progressed largely in Europe. In 1973, he joined the Stuttgart Ballet in Germany where his first dance creations were performed at the end of the 1970s. From 1983 to 2004, he directed the Frankfurt Ballet and built its reputation. Playing particularly on the "inside-outside" of arms and legs, he dislocated classic ballet vocabulary, made it his own and reformulated it. This choreographer of artefacts and artificial worlds arrived at virtuosity and violence via hybrid language. He explored the potential and the virtuality of new technologies while not denying repertory which he refined with gusto. The force and originality of William Forsythe's fine and now immediately identifiable writing is reinforced by the exceptional quality of his performers. With more than sixty pieces behind him, including Impressing the Czar (1988) Limbs Theorem (1990) and Eidos:Telos (1995), he recently choreographed for his company, Kammer/Kammer and One Flat Thing, Reproduced, but he has also created pieces for different international ballet company's including the New York City Ballet, the Nederlands Dans Theater and the Opéra de Paris for whom he created, among others, the famous, In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated (1987). At the Avignon Festival, William Forsythe presented In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated / Die Betragung des Robert Scott in the Courtyard of Honour in the Pope's Palace in 1991.
A master of change, of the un-permanent and of imbalance, William Forsythe likes to place performers in danger. For this American choreographer, his work must develop from the inside to the outside. His reflections about the body that is constantly reconfigured, can be interpreted as the anatomy of an era. Forsythe is a man of his time and translates though the body, the symptoms of a cellular, muscular and osseous point of view. Whether small shapes or big creations, or those created with other artists, his investigations leave nothing out. "In a space full of the constantly moving and jittery bodies of the dancers, a new body, a sort of monstrous skeletal construction is fashioned by the hands of the audience. In William Forsythe's installation, You Made Me a Monster, a tangle of bones is untangled and reshaped by the audience while the space surrounds them, observes them, responds to their movements, amplifies their decisions and reflects the structure they have chosen: the hard, linear shape of bones, amorphic spaces changing in between them. The space becomes a vortex of bodies: imagined bodies, present bodies, created bodies and desired bodies. The space, the audience, the bones, all enter the dancers' bodies while the dancers' bodies enter the altered and altering space." Dana Caspersen.
Distribution
choreography William Forsythe
Mise en espace : William Forsythe
Dance : Roberta Mosca, Christopher Roman
Video : Phillip Bussmann
Sound : Dietrich Krüger
Production
Production : The Forsythe Company (Francfort)
En coproduction avec : la Biennale de Venise et Tanz im August (Berlin)
Avec le support : du Siemans Arts Program
