Channels for the desire to dance.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the ballets of William Forsythe is the way these works make classical dance seem as valid and exploratory a form of contemporary art as any other style of movement. American-born Forsythe, who has directed Frankfurt Ballet since 1984, has works in the repertoires of most of the world's major ballet companies, among them Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, New York City Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Royal Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, and Royal Swedish Ballet. Forsythe's remarkable capacity to rethink and reinvigorate the language of classical dance is shown in such works as In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated; New Sleep; Herman Schmerman; and the second detail. Though his choreography today goes well beyond the structured confines of ballet, he continues to work with classically trained dancers, involving them in a collaborative approach to choreography that looks anew at such conventions as turnout, placement, verticality, balance, and spatial orientation.

In Forsythe's work movement itself is the subject--movement deconstructed and reassembled in conjunction with a distinctive theatrical aesthetic that combines speech and film, silence and stasis, amplified sound and mesmerizing lighting. Ballet technique echos and resonates under the skin of the dance.

His combination of technical innovation and intellectual inquiry has won Forsythe a particularly appreciative following in Europe, where he has been based since he left his first job at Joffrey Ballet to join Stuttgart Ballet in 1973. In France Frankfurt Ballet holds an official second residence at the Chatelet Theatre in Paris, where it plays to a large, fervent following that delights in exploration. Such mass encouragement of trailblazing by an established company is rare in the United States.

The cultural differences on each side of the Atlantic were highlighted at UNited We Dance, the international festival hosted by San Francisco Ballet last spring. SFB artistic director Helgi Tomasson, who had commissioned New Sleep from Forsythe in 1987, expressed astonishment at how pervasive his influence was on many ballets performed by the European companies. "For me, that has been one of the revelations of the festival," says Tomasson. "New Sleep is a great success here, but I don't get the sense that people have been fundamentally affected by his work in the same way in the States."

That Forsythe's work has been in some sense less culturally suited to his native country than to Europe is a curious irony, given that his early artistic preferences were very American indeed. Born in Manhasset on Long Island in 1949, he grew up "wanting to be in musicals, which I choreographed--the kind of stuff you do in high school. I have always danced--I learned to dance by myself. I used to watch Fred Astaire on television and then spend my afternoons practicing rock 'n' roll in the kitchen, holding onto the refrigerator. Dancing in America is a really important part of the culture--you see it in the way we move--the way we dance, play music a lot. The biggest factor for me was American musical culture, and I'm glad that I learned ballet afterward--in that way, the other stuff could filter into it."

Formal dance training began later while majoring in drama ("I knew that I wanted to go on the stage") at Jacksonville University in Florida. He was subsequently awarded a scholarship to the Joffrey Ballet School (where he studied with Maggie Black and Finis Jhung), performed with its parent company, and was the last dancer to be hired for John Cranko's Stuttgart Ballet before the director's untimely death in 1973.

Marcia Haydee, who took over as artistic director after a brief incumbency by Glen Tetley, continued Cranko's policy of nurturing creative talent within the company. (Aspiring choreographers who had already been given first starts in Stuttgart included John Neumeier, Uwe Scholz, and Jiri Kylian.) Forsythe made his first piece, a lyrical pas de deux called Urlicht (to Mahler), for the Noverre Society Young Choreographers Workshop in 1976, and saw it enter the company's repertoire the following year. Appointed resident choreographer by Haydee, Forsythe made a number of works in quick succession for the company, largely concerned, he says, "with reusing dance language that everyone knows, but in a different manner, a different order."

Stuttgart brought a Forsythe program to New York City in 1979, but it was with Say Bye Bye, made for Netherlands Dance Theater in 1980 and presented in New York City on a 1982 NDT tour, that the already distinctive theatrical and technical characteristics of Forsythe's work began to be remarked upon more widely. Like Love Songs and Square Deal, which he staged for Joffrey Ballet the following year, Say Bye Bye drew upon popular culture in its use of speech, lighting, and music; set classical dance in an unexpected context; and wreaked havoc on viewer expectations. All three works drew alternating salvos of critical praise and disapprobation for the technical and emotional limits to which Forsythe pushed the dancers, and for their evocation of violence and disintegration--divergently interpreted as the choreographer's violence to the viewer's sensibilities and classical dance itself, or as prescient social commentary that deployed the tools of the culture it condemned.

"Billy was way before his time," comments Nora Kimball, a signature member of Frankfurt Ballet who has known Forsythe since they first danced together in Stuttgart. "His work was absolutely extraordinary from the beginning, with an immediately distinctive style of movement and an amazing sense of theater. I think that audiences weren't sure what it was that they were seeing, but they were mesmerized anyway. You could put on all of those works now, and they would hold up."

On the evidence, indeed, Forsythe's talent must have been undeniably evident to many: After leaving Stuttgart in 1980, he worked as a freelance choreographer for three years (during which time the perspicacious Rudolf Nureyev commissioned France/Dance for Paris Opera Ballet, in which perspicacious Forsythe featured the adolescent Sylvie Guillem and Manuel Legris). Eventually, he found in Frankfurt Ballet the company that would encourage the pioneering work that most interested him.

Frankfurt's director Egon Madsen in 1983 commissioned Gange--ein Stuck uber Ballett (broadly translated, "Goings--a piece about ballet"). In this important work Forsythe seems to have moved away from direct references to a social context toward an exploration of the origins and parameters of dance itself. Worked on over a lengthy period, and set to music by Thomas Jahn, the fourpart Gange apparently attempted to take apart the structures of balletic form and convention and to incorporate details of the making of the work (and the lives of the dancers) into the final product. "I think that this was the first time that Billy created a piece by assembling and then processing a lot of information from the dancers," says Kimball. "We spent weeks just writing or drawing, or showing our holiday slides, rather than starting with a particular piece of music or a sequence of steps the way that most choreographers tend to do. Then afterward, he put everything together, and the result was like nothing that anyone had ever seen."

Gange horrified the Opera's more conservative subscribers, but Forsythe was nonetheless invited to direct Frankfurt Ballet. Over the last decade he has transformed this formerly traditional company into a unique and finely honed instrument for his choreography; now it is a group of immensely talented, often physically unconventional performers with highly developed individual skills (this ability to spot exceptional dancers and bring out their hidden qualities is even more marked when he works with other companies). Forsythe has always stressed the importance of the dancers' contribution to his work and of his providing an environment in which they can find their own voices.

In a 1983 interview before he was nominated to head the ballet, he said, "You have to give people a sense of self-worth about their dancing. Working on Gange, I spent hours teaching the dancers how to construct their own neoclassical variations. I like to arrive at the state where they function choreographically and take responsibility for the work." Over a decade later, Forsythe can claim to have developed an ensemble of dancers who are at ease with this idea--one that is fundamentally inimical to the usual power relations between dancer and choreographer, and at odds with conventional ballet training. (This recently proved a relatively short-lived problem in making Firstext for Royal Ballet, with dancers unaccustomed to this way of working: the results showed, however, that even the most conservative of companies can adapt.)

"I want my choreography to serve as a channel for the desire to dance," says Forsythe. "I try to say to people, You have permission to dance, but you have to give it to yourself. Dancing is about identifying with the present--you have a very large number of tiny moments, and the possibility of understanding and showing these moments through the clarity of the ideas that you are moving with and toward. You have to go to the limit of your physical intuition of the idea; if you are doing an arabesque, you have to 'see' arabesque with your body, and try to coincide to some degree. You can never 'do' arabesque--it exists as an idea--but you can approach it, and move through it, and receive a tremendous amount of joy by identifying with a very simple and beautiful thing."

Because the city of Frankfurt fully subsidizes its ballet company, the director has a freedom to determine its artistic policy that is unknown in North America, or in European capitals with more rigidly entrenched dance traditions. From the beginning of his directorship, Forsythe has been able to make works according to artistic rather than box-office necessity; he is emphatic, however, that the budget has very definite limits, and that the company has a responsibility to the community that supports it.

Artifact, Forsythe's first work as company director in 1984, was received with anything but community joy, if his own testimony is anything to go by ("thirteen hundred seats, and seventy-eight people in the audience"), but now it is one of the staples in the repertory, virtually the Swan Lake of Frankfurt in terms of its ability to fill houses. The evening-length four-part work that combines extensive speech, an elaborate gestural repertoire, and extremely formal pure-dance sections--and sometimes frenetic combinations of all of those--was greatly influenced by Forsythe's interest in the movement model developed by Rudolf von Laban. Always a prolific reader, Forsythe first came across Laban's theories in 1971 while "totally unable to move" after a knee operation. In this system, the body is seen in relation to twenty-seven points that mark a three-dimensional cube all around it--an imaginary "kinesphere" that describes the limits of the body's extension in space.

"What I began to do," he says, "was imagine a kind of serial movement and, maintaining certain arm positions from ballet, move through this model, orienting the body toward the imaginary external points. It's like ballet, which also orients steps toward exterior points (croise, efface ...), but equal importance is given to all points, nonlinear movements can be incorporated, and different body parts can move toward the points at varied rates in time."

What this translates into in visual terms, in Artifact and subsequent works, is dance that is immediately identifiable as "ballet" but that registers simultaneously with a shock of the new, as configurations of familiar positions are altered, and conventional transitions between steps are eschewed or given deliberate and unusual emphasis. The questions of how we perceive things, how meaning is derived from context--always preoccupations for forsythe--are, in Artifact, given explicit spoken form by a "woman in historical costume" whose presence links the disparate sections. These questions are also, however, expressed through extensions of the logic of balletic grammar, and by the subversion of many theatrical conventions: the relationships between soloists and corps de ballet are unpredictable; the lighting alternately prevents or forces full vision; the fire curtain crashes down repeatedly during an exquisite double pas de deux. In a style that is recognizable in many subsequent pieces, the torso and arms have lives of their own, contributing to the momentum and direction of the movement instead of accessorizing the lower limbs, and the entire body is used with a disregard for the vertical planes to which classical technique adheres, pitching the dancer into unknown extensions and astonishing muscular articulations, changing the dynamics of partnering, and introducing a notion of disequilibrium that classical ballet has traditionally spurned as anathema.

Both Laban and speech served as models for Forsythe in the creation of Artifact, and both have continued to influence the way he works, even as he constantly looks for other models or systems that can open up new ways to invent movement. Over the last few years he has, much like Merce Cunningham, turned to computers as a way of freeing himself from the autocracy of choreographic decisions: in the first part of the 1992 ALIE/NA(C)TION, the dancers' trajectories and sequences are determined by a program written by Forsythe and dancer David Kern. "If I look back," he says, "I can see these interests already cropping up in my work in 1977, in attempts to substitute dancing for language, or vice versa--one sign for another, in linguistic terms. I wanted to see how the two could suspend and support one another, and that conceptual idea led to my using linguistic models as an analogy for choreography--for example, what would happen to a step when you alter one aspect of its logic, or the conventional planes of orientation? With computers, it's much the same thing, except the infinity of choice goes way beyond your individual capacity to imagine a substitution, and the systems allow the dancers themselves to encounter and engender new possibilities."

The first tangible indication that he could describe or reproduce what he was trying to do with movement came in 1986 with Die Befragung des Robert Scott ("The Interrogation of Robert Scott"), an austere one-act ballet that Forsythe considers the most important artistic development in his early work with Frankfurt Ballet. "I began the ballet with the idea that I mentioned, that you cannot 'do' arabesque, but that we could try, which was a lot of fun, and what the work is all about. You can't pin down the South Pole on a map, and so obviously Robert Scott's arrival there was purely hypothetical--just like doing ballet, where the decision as to whether you have 'arrived' is a subjective one. It's a moment that can't be formulated very well. Actually, it probably can be formulated brilliantly by someone else, but not me! With Scott, the dancers and I began to see that we could actually create a whole vocabulary to describe some of the things that we were doing in enacting this idea. We developed the notion of kinetic isometries, where the dancers tried to register an exterior and interior refraction of movement in their bodies, and proceed according to the 'reading' that they achieved of their own states. Suddenly, mental agility had to be equal to physical agility, and that was really important."

As he was making great strides in Frankfurt, Forsythe was also on the point of showing his mettle to the big-league ballet companies. In 1987 he created both In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated for Paris Opera Ballet and New Sleep for San Francisco Ballet. Both were commissions, both, like Robert Scott, had scores by the young Dutch composer Thom Willems, who was beginning to work steadily with Forsythe, and both received rapturous responses from audiences and critics. It was, however, In the Middle (a second Nureyev commission), that won Forsythe broader repute on an international level. "The most exciting new ballet that I have seen anywhere for a long time," wrote John Percival in the London Times, while the Paris dance press was scarcely able to contain its excitement at what it perceived as a genuine masterpiece in its midst. Capitalizing on the remarkable techniques and personalities of his nine original dancers (Guillem, Isabelle Guerin, Laurent Hilaire, Manuel Legris, Fanny Gaida, and Lionel Delanoe among them), Forsythe pushed their academic schooling beyond its known boundaries in a series of intricate, intense solos and pas de deux, lighting them with moody brilliance, testing the limits of balance, flexibility, agility, and coordination so that the usually decorous dancers looked like panthers and angels at play.

What is perhaps most remarkable about In the Middle, now in the repertoires of seven ballet companies, is its feeling of veracity. This is what ballet, stripped of its between-steps codes, can look like--athletic, thrilling, puzzling, poetic. This is what classical dancers today are capable of doing; this is how they watch one another--competitive, exacting, but also willing to plunge into movement with commitment and passion, to enter into what Balanchine and Stravinsky conceived for Agon--a suite of dances that is also a contest of equals.

For his own company the following year, Forsythe put In the Middle in the middle of a new work: the evening-length Impressing the Czar. Like Isabelle's Dance, the musical that he had always wanted to make, and finally did for his company in 1986, it offers a delirious, highly entertaining proliferation of "characters" and fragmented narratives. Czar illustrates well Forsythe's innate sense of theater and ability to charm and amuse on a grand scale: gilded objects (including a large-scale version of the two overhead cherries that give In the Middle its name), an oversized Alice-in-Wonderland chessboard on which some Prince Valiant-like archer shoots golden arrows, and, at the end, the memorable spectacle of the whole company in schoolgirl dress and identical pageboy bobs doing a rampaging "Zulu" dance ("Bongo Bongo Nageela") to Willems's rousing rhythms.

Forsythe has largely continued to construct in this way since 1988, making a series of full-length ballets--Slingerland I, II, and III, Limb's Theorem (1989-90), The Loss of Small Detail (1991), ALIE/NA(C)TION (1992), As a Garden in This Setting (1993), Eidos:Telos (1995)--that are built from or around the kernels of shorter pieces, as well as a number of ballets for his own and other companies.

Although he declares himself influenced by and liberally quotes from intellectuals, it is obvious from his work that Forsythe's real focus is the dancing body, and that the intellectual apparatus that he brings to bear on his work is but one part of the searching curiosity that has shaped his personality.

"I'm not a philosopher or an architect," he says, "and I'm not trying to be one. I like to be informed by other disciplines--the whole structure of perception is very different. I'm always fascinated by what constellation of events in a person's life--and what kinds of questions--would lead them toward a particular decision that results in this painting or installation or film or sculputre. I try to look at the nature of the work that it took to make it. That's a great moment when you are standing before something--the nature of somebody's work that you don't yet know. Perhaps you never will."

The nature of Forsythe's own work has become harder to discern as he has moved away from recontextualizing classical dance and toward finding new ways of generating movvement. The Loss of Small Detail perhaps marked the moment of creative change in its setting of a first half (the second detail) motivated by balletic certainties, and a second informed by notions of disintegration and dissolution. With its many finely pleated sculptural costumes by Issey Miyake, its haunting long lines and cataclysmic crashes of sound by Willems, and its white, shadowless light, part two of The Loss of Small Detail is a ballet like no other ever made, its style of movement as integral to its atmosphere as a language is to its native culture. Looking like a ballet turned inside out, it offers--as do As a Garden in This Setting and the haunting Quintett (1993)--the boneless bodies of the dancers in a continually dissolving and evolving movement that can be centered on or refracted from one body part to another, calling up some sort of archaic moment of predance.

"It's like classical epaulement," explains Forsythe. "There's coordination between the angles of the hand, the foot, the hip, and the head, and you can isolate whichever elements you choose. We discovered that because focus--the gaze of the eye--in epaulement is very important, you can dis-focus yourself by moving your head in counterrotation. This intensifies your sense of proprioception--where your body is in space--and causes your sense of gravity to shift, like when you close your eyes and somebody pushes you, you automatically bend your knees. In this way, you subvert all the things that you do instinctively as a ballet dancer, without destroying them--you just end up in an opposite state of support. Loss of Small Detail is based on that, and the small detail that is lost is your physical orientation: your body gives up one kind of strength, and another kind comes in."

A notion of working with bodily fragility has been even more important to Forsythe since his wife, Tracy-Kai Maier, a former San Francisco Ballet principal dancer, and perhaps the quintessential exponent of his work in her transparent clarity of execution, died of cancer in 1993.

"My wife's illness and death has made me more than ever aware of how you are going to have to give in to your body anyway," he says. "If you accept that sooner, and integrate it into your life, life becomes richer and more informative.

"In terms of dance, the more that you can let go of your control, and give it over to a kind of trnsparency in the body, the more you will be able to grasp differentiated form and dynamics. You can move very fast in this state, and it won't give the impression of violence. It's like trying to divest your body of movement."

Forsythe has developed a complex movement vocabulary around these ideas that he has recently put into CD-ROM format. Ironically, his most urgent preoccupations (with finding new ways of articulating the ballet body) are diametrically opposed to those that his critics have accused him of, dismissing such pieces as In the Middle as a one-dimensional exploitation of academic acrobatics, and Forsythe himself as a sleight-of-hand manipulator of audience emotions along with the lighting box.

Rather than treating ballet as a museum piece to be preserved, Forsythe sees it as a form containing within itself the seeds of reinvention, capable of integrating ideas from other intellectual and cultural domains and changing itself in like fashion.

"I think ballet is a very, very good idea, which gets pooh-poohed by one group of people, and overinvested by another," he says. "Let me make a metaphor: It's as if people said that a compass isn't valuable because it divides the world into top and bottom and orients you in this way. Ballet is a body of knowledge, not an ideology, and I see it as something from which you can depart. I use ballet because I use ballet dancers and the knowledge that is in their bodies. If you have only looked at the exterior of classical dance, how can you say what the limits of the representation of ballet are? I think that a lot of people are attracted to ballet because it's a very organized structure and it organizes them. And if you present them with something that has tried to undo that structure, you can come up against a lot of resistance."