FRANKFURT BALLET.

FRANKFURT BALLET BAM OPERA HOUSE DECEMBER 2-5, 1998

At the end of the brilliant second act of William Forsythe's Eidos: Telos, the gray fire curtain at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Opera House dropped and the applause began. It became apparent that the curtain was not going to rise, that there would be no curtain calls, and still the audience applauded. In the orchestra section no one rose; the applause continued. It was simply the only appropriate response.

Program notes indicate that Eidos: Telos ("Form: End") had a cerebral genesis. Its conception may have been one thing, but its impact is something else. The work packs emotional, visual, and visceral punches. Its meanings are varied, elusive, mysterious, and open to interpretation.

The piece has three sections, with the first ("Self Meant to Govern") and the third ("Part III") serving as bookends to the galvanizing middle section ("Part II"). The first is an introduction, an education in Forsythe's bold, idiosyncratic, mechanistic, attenuated, ballet-based movement. It is ballet after Agon, ballet after Merce, done to the sound of a metronome and a violin played onstage (Thom Willems's music, performed by Maxim Franke, sound processed by Joel Ryan) and marked by a timer clock ticking off the seconds and minutes of a lifetime.

In the remarkable second act, a woman--the intelligent Dana Caspersen, in one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever witnessed--appears bare-breasted, wearing a long, orange, bustled skirt, and performs a monologue ("We are lying between stars, spinning") through much of the act, while moving in an agitated, almost spastic, manner. Her monologue, meant to suggest Persephone, abducted by Hades and forced to spend time in the underworld, seems to me a great rage against the cosmos. During the making of the piece, Forsythe's wife, Tracy-Kai Maier, died of cancer at the tragically early age of thirty-two; it must have impacted here, this rage against mortality, the ultimate frailty of the human body, for even that strongest and most glorious of humans, the dancer. At the end men and women waltz around Caspersen, all in their own great skirts--love and death in Venice, the great cosmic waltz in 2001--but here the dance is also outraged, scatological, nonsensical, abusive. It is artistically controlled, abetted by technology--a web of great wires, televisions, magnified sounds--a technological hell Dante never envisioned. As a whole, it screams and screeches with pain.

And the third act, relatively pared down, is a denouement: amid the other dancers, their bodies twisted, asymmetrical, Caspersen appears at the back of the stage, grotesque, a plague figure, crawling nude and white out of her skirt, an image of birth and rebirth.

I think it no accident that the American Forsythe has made his career in Germany. His work has a toughness, an anguish, an intellectual engagement, a harsh romanticism that fit that society and show a face of humanity that is not easily an expression of the American sensibility. But from that society, with its extremes and complexities, has come great art and thought: Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner; and it seems to me that, in some sense, Forsythe is a descendant of their presences on this earth.