Dancing to a new tune
Choreography | William Forsythe tells Laura Cappelle why he is leaving the company he founded 10 years ago and re-embracing ballet
Sitting down to lunch in a busy café in Paris, William Forsythe is matter-of-fact about a momentous transition for the troupe he founded in 2005, and for himself. “With only 16 people, we all burnt out,” says the choreographer. “I should maybe have rung the alarm sooner, but you always wonder if it is an anomaly or a trend.”
At 65, Forsythe is calling it a day in characteristically low-key fashion. From next season, choreographer Jacopo Godani will take over as director of The Forsythe Company, which will in effect cease to be associated with its founder. His dancers and staff are already preparing to disperse, to be replaced by a new group.
The rigours of being at the wheel, both artistically and financially, have taken their toll. Together with his composer Thom Willems, who mixes scores live, Forsythe is hands-on at the tech table for every performance, relentlessly “conducting” and adjusting his own work. His contract with the cities of Frankfurt and Dresden, which jointly fund The Forsythe Company, added to the strain, with the demand for three new evening-length pieces a year and outreach commitments.
The American-born choreographer has lost nothing of his intellectual fascination with the organisation of movement, however. From the 1980s on, after a dance career in the US and in Stuttgart, he choreographed works on an architectural scale that overturned expectations of what ballet could and should look like post-Balanchine. Early masterpieces at Frankfurt Ballet, such as Artifact and Impressing the Czar, stretched the classical technique to breaking point, tilting and twisting dancers’ lines as Willems’ music surged around them.
In many ways, Forsythe became to ballet what Merce Cunningham was to modern dance, displacing the established logic and hierarchy of the genre, opening up new horizons in the process.
Around 2000, Forsythe moved increasingly towards the contemporary vocabulary, and in 2004 he left Frankfurt Ballet to create the leaner, more flexible Forsythe Company. His move away from ballet has been interpreted as a quasi-philosophical shift, but Forsythe’s explanation is more pragmatic.
“I stopped doing ballet because I couldn’t afford pointe shoes for my dancers any more,” he says, adding with a laugh: “Is there a better reason? We also had to move out of the Frankfurt Opera House, and I don’t think ballet works as well in tight spaces. A ballet is like a hothouse flower: it needs certain conditions.”
The works he has created since have met with a mixed reception, as critics and audiences have grappled with what they perceived as increasingly abstruse performances. According to Forsythe, however, the principles behind them haven’t changed. There is a cerebral, academic exactness to his vision of choreography. Time and again, our conversation returns to the notion of counterpoint — a dialogue between choreography and music, or between performers, that maintains the individuality of each element — which he says has been his sole analytical focus in the studio for the past 10 years.
In Paris in December, Study #3, Forsythe’s final work for The Forsythe Company and a “mini-retrospective” of fragments from past works, read like a dizzying summation of the company’s collective experience. Many scenes are, as he puts it, “performer-specific”, drawing on the unique movement quality of particular dancers, or on their vocal abilities to add stories or songs.
Forsythe’s company has produced an unusual number of choreographers over the years, from David Dawson to Crystal Pite or Helen Pickett. Dawson noted that unlike ballet companies, Forsythe treats dancers as peers. In the studio, he is a gentle presence: a rehearsal I observed at the Théâtre de Chaillot looked more like a casual conversation between artists than a series of corrections.
“I pay people because I want to work with them. I start with: thank you so much for finding me,” Forsythe says with unusual self-effacement. “My job is to be at the service of talent looking for the right place to practise.”
The idiosyncratic nature of the Forsythe Company’s repertoire means that its leader has decided to let it disappear with the ensemble. When I venture a comparison with Pina Bausch, he points out that her brand of Tanztheater was tied to her performers, and in his view its future remains uncertain. “I have a very similar situation. Unlike in ballet, people are not replaceable. It’s not the repertoire I’ll miss, it’s their qualities.”
While The Forsythe Company moves on, its founder is moving back to Vermont — “I’m gardening, and I have a chainsaw, I take care of the woods” — and, for the first time in years, taking on part-time roles with other institutions in addition to his visual arts installations. Starting in the autumn, he will teach at the University of Southern California’s new Kaufman School of Dance.
Twenty-eight years after In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated brought a young Sylvie Guillem to the fore, Forsythe is also set to return to the Paris Opera Ballet. In a coup for the French company, new director Benjamin Millepied announced last month that Forsythe would join as associate choreographer and spend three months of each season in Paris, teaching and creating. Forsythe praises Millepied’s “broad mind”, and he will come full circle in 2016 with his first new ballet in more than 15 years.
His love of ballet history and belief in the plasticity of the classical technique certainly seem intact. He is obsessed, he says, with Marius Petipa’s Paquita Grand Pas — “I can’t think of a more prototypical Balanchine ballet” — and enthuses about the ballets of Alexei Ratmansky and of Justin Peck, who will make his Paris Opera debut next year. “Benjamin [Millepied] introduced me to [Peck’s] work, and I told him he didn’t need me. That is an extraordinary talent
— you don’t need a bunch of old guys!”
“Old” or not, Forsythe’s neoclassical works remain in demand all over the world. This week, English National Ballet is staging In the Middle at Sadler’s Wells for the first time as part of a Modern Masters bill. The best places to see Forsythe’s work in recent years have been two companies slightly off the beaten track, with Forsythe alumni at the helm: the Royal Ballet of Flanders, until the departure of Kathryn Bennetts in 2012, and Dresden’s Semperoper Ballett, his current neoclassical home.
The loss of details in performance elsewhere is a concern for him. “Other companies have this impression of what Forsythe is,” he says. “They think they should modernise ballet, but it doesn’t need modernisation. It’s just a misunderstanding. People associate me with some idea of liberty. Liberty from what? Ballet offers me everything.”
