Forsythe’s Box: On the Afterlife of Choreography

“Open the box . . . yes you can’t, yes you can . . . the box is open.” These words, spoken into a microphone by a menacing male with a shaved head, wavered between command, threat, entreaty, invitation, and temptation. Of course, there was no box on the minimalist stage of William Forsythe’s Yes We Can’t, which premiered at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden in March 2008, but only three microphones and an ordinary white exercise mat. In the absence of a referential object, the audience was confronted by the overdetermined associations of “box,” which might refer to graves, secrets, storage, archives, theatres, or, ominously, a crudely depersonalized female sex. Although such an extreme implication may seem far-fetched, just such a salacious shadow of sexual violence haunted the work. The uneasy proximity of “box” and “sex” was made explicit when a female performer breathily baited the audience with the words, “put your stuff in the box . . . put your stuff in my box,” repeating phrases that alliteratively intermingled indefinite and definite articles. This linguistic technique became a central device that instigated slippages between can/n’t, would/n’t, could/n’t, and cunt.

Cunt? If such petulant crudity seems unlike Forsythe’s sublimely cerebral ballets, Yes We Can’t was astoundingly unfamiliar territory. His mesmerizing displays of technical achievement had vanished, leaving his spectator perched on the edge of an incipient nightmare, as if having been admitted to an all-too-private dimension of wildly dystopian desire. Nor was this an isolated experiment. During the last decade, a decisive shift has occurred in Forsythe’s work leading to the inclusion of elements—non-dance movement, interaction with props, and spoken language— previously foreign to the purity of his formal vocabulary. On the surface, this might appear to be a calculated move into dance theatre, and indeed, the first piece of his new direction, Kammer/Kammer, presented itself as a “dance theatre performance art piece,” that would discuss “some person named Pina Bausch,” Tanztheater’s grande dame. Consequently, Forsythe’s consistent use of minimal decor, rehearsal-like costumes, and performance sequences clearly derived from studio exercises appeared to be coordinated with the exploration of stilted, overtly uncomfortable content in order to make use of the stylistic provocations common to an increasingly successful generation of European choreographers who have adopted Bausch’s legacy.

Unlike these contemporaries, and even given the inelegant obscenity characterizing cunt, Forsythe’s ultimate intention was not to antagonize his audience. Forsythe’s principal recent works—especially Kammer/Kammer (2000), Decreation (2003), Heterotopia (2006), and Yes We Can’t (2008)—have progressively abdicated irony as a means of strategic provocation. Without irony, which served as an indexical marker of artistic intention, Forsythe’s uncomfortable content was stripped of aesthetic purpose and became enigmatically uninflected. Authorial interests thus obfuscated, his works presented an almost aesthetically unmediated staging of the obscene. Understood literally, the obscene takes place offstage and out-of-sight. Hence, as his spectator drifted dangerously near the horrors lurking on the edge of the scene, Forsythe devoted his attention to the impermeable potential of the prefix “ob,” which means towards, against, in the way of, or in front of. By formally emulating theatre’s impenetrable limits in the radical technical restriction of his linguistic, corporeal, and spatial idioms, Forsythe has permitted his spectator to indirectly sense the obscene as an immeasurably mediated presence, as if occluded behind an impasse or obstacle—the box.

Although Forsythe sought to resist the imperative to subject his audience to the violence concealed in aesthetic form, the first moment of Yes We Can’t appeared to be nothing less than an orchestrated offensive upon the spectator. Its stunning introduction unleashed a crescendo of light, sound, and action: dense electronic music blasted as white, industrial lamps (the work’s sole lighting), illuminated a nearly empty space through which a male performer, entering upstage center, rushed towards the audience, his arms stretched to his sides as he released a resounding roar. His gesture blew its audience back, and when the dancer concluded his potent scream he paused and withdrew into a complex...