New German Dance Studies

12. Negotiating Choreography, Letter, and Law in William Forsythe

12. Negotiating Choreography, Letter, and Law in William Forsythe Gerald Siegmund Writing the Human Strange and unusual hammering and thumping sounds fill the air as one enters the performance space. What captures our attention is not what we see, but what we hear. Clang, clang clang: these insistent noises speak of a relentless activity whose nature, however, escapes us. They beckon us to come forward where we are met by a sea of identical tables neatly aligned in three rows that extend to the very back of the hall. The tabletops are covered in white sheets of paper. There were sixty of them in Zurich, Switzerland, where the performance piece premiered in October 2005 in the Schiffbauhalle, a huge hall formerly used for ship building. A year later, in Bockenheimer Depot, in an old tram depot in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, forty of them were enough to fill the room.1 Cautiously, uncertain of what to expect, we approach. The dancers have taken up residence at the tables and are engaged in strangely contorted movements that seem to absorb them fully. One is lying on his back on the table, arms pressed tightly against his body. In his hands he clutches two carbon pencils with which he marks thick black lines on the paper by wriggling his entire body. He does not use his hands for writing, as is the norm. Here the hands are immobile, while the remaining body is set in motion by rubbing itself against the tabletop. Elsewhere, a female dancer throws a carbon pencil like a dart at her table. The pencil leaves little imprints on the paper before fracturing into little pieces from the impact. When examining the tables more closely, one notices that they are already inscribed. In thin and barely visible lines, words, phrases, and even entire sentences are written on them—in various languages, as one discovers when comparing different tables. The new carbon lines and dots are aimed at these words—a sort of attempt to pin down the words. Yet i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 200 4/5/12 3:29 PM Choreography, Letter, and Law in William Forsythe 201 they also overwrite, miss, or circumscribe them, blurring their contours rather than making them more visible (Figures 12.1, 12.2). The written phrases derive from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the United Nations proclaimed after the catastrophe of the Second World War in Geneva in 1948. They serve the choreographer William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas, Nash Professor of Law and Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University, in the truest sense of the term as a basis for Human Writes, whose title puns on the homonym “right” for law, and “write” for writing and inscribing. The letters of the law are meant to be written by the performers. Law breaks and mirrors itself in writing, word against flesh, in the writing with the body and its movements. Law is thus ultimately ruptured in the choreography with which it nonetheless enters a close relation. Curious, we walk along the aisles. Small groups form around the various tables only to disperse after a while when we have become tired of watching the dancers exerting their Sisyphuslike tasks. Whatever they produce, they either seem to undo again with their very next move, or they take what looks like unnecessary detours to perform movements that could be executed in much Figure 12.1. Human Writes, choreographed by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas. Photo: Dominik Mentzos. Pictured: William Forsythe and Ander Zabala. i-xii_1-284_Mann.indd 201 4/5/12 3:29 PM 202 gerald siegmund more direct ways. Standing in the midst of all this activity we have lost sight and track of what other people do at their tables. The space is divided into sixty or forty individual performance spaces, small territories made unique by the tasks their resident dancers have chosen to enact. After we have walked around the tables for a while, stopping here and there to observe and watch, the dynamics of the activities change. The dancers invite the members of the audience to assist them in their activities and to help them make the writing on the tabletops more visible. By working together, the audience and dancers save the thin pencil traces of the Declaration of Human Rights from oblivion and obliteration. A young dancer, Pipo Tafel, asks me...