Media-Bodies: Choreography as Intermedial Thinking Through in the Work of William Forsythe

Since Ballet Frankfurt was reconstituted as the Forsythe Company in 2004, William Forsythe has increasingly explored formats of installation art practice. Works such as Human Writes (in collaboration with Kendall Thomas, 2005) and You made me a monster (2005) develop within an interactive and intermedial space and experiment with new ways to experience the production and perception of movement. “Performance installation” is the new term for this intertwined process of movement production and movement perception. The choreographic composition itself grows out of procedures of performative sensing by the dancers, which spreads to onlookers. This multiplex awareness of movement for which the dancer’s body is the medium constitutes what I shall call the “media-body” as an essential moment of performance installation as choreographic event. Compared to earlier Forsythe installations—which he called “choreographic objects”—like White Bouncy Castle (1997), City of Abstracts (2000), or Scattered Crowd (2002),¹ with their accessible spaces of movement (in White Bouncy Castle the spectator was a visitor moving about freely inside a white inflatable castle, and City of Abstracts featured choreographic projections of movement on large screens in open spaces) performance installations take place squarely in the theatrical context: in theater lobbies, exhibit halls, or accessible public performance spaces where dancers and the audience come together in a mutually shared yet operationally divided space that leads them into an interactive relationship.

The performative structure of the works does not suggest any kind of closed choreographic order geared to the audience. Much more frequently, it evokes poetic spaces with a powerful emotional charge, operating on the borderline of disorder and exalted excess. At the thematic center of the performance installations Human Writes and You made me a monster dwells terror and physical horror as well as the inescapable necessity to expose oneself to such experience. The subject disperses through the atmosphere like a wave between performer and audience, without taking on the clear contours of either symbol or allegory. Instead, singular actions, permeated by layered soundscapes, and pictorial composition prevail.

These works pose the question of how the choreographer’s art—that is, the art of ordering bodies and their movements in time and space—is able to make images, stories, and feelings concrete. The productions remain consciously dedicated to the performativity of the event in the way they unfold in the here and now—an open space of experienced presence that avoids the representation of emotional states but conveys states of the body. These works purvey a conception of the body as a terrain acted upon by the work as much as an agent of inscribed and remembered forms that become newly actualized: a body that presents itself to view while consciously monitoring its own actualizations. Patterns, behaviors, and moments of tension—both memorized and subject to change through improvisational reaction to others—conduct the dancer’s movements through a great variety of sensual, visual, and spoken information throughout the performance. On this level, these works are characterized by a type of movement-specific intermediality that thinks through interlacing body images, sensual spaces of experience, movement codes, spoken or written story fragments, and embodied memories. This is what I mean by “intermediality,” which I consider to include but also be in excess of the technological interface.

Human Writes: A Procedural Space of Empty Exchange

The goal of performance installation is, therefore, to uncover spaces of experience and transformations of bodily states that raise questions about physical and mental conditions. Clearly, performance installation is marginal to the category “dance,” particularly with respect to ballet. Forsythe is driven through this work to transgress the conventions of dance even more than he did in his earlier choreography, which was engaged with an art form so typically burdened by tradition: ballet. In a 2006 interview, Forsythe expressed his interest in working within the art context (in collaborations with Peter Welz) since it allows him to question the body as a figure and a gestalt in new ways. In so doing, he gives greater definition to the processes of production and perception of movement that undergird these installations:

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