William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point (review)

The conceptual category of choreography has recently been expanding to include a wide range of artistic, scholarly, and social concerns that may or may not derive from the practice of dance, or even performance. What the term choreography is being asked to do in this current interdisciplinary context depends a great deal, of course, upon who is asking and from which field the question arises. But in framing exhibition—curating, urban planning, digital-information design, and social networking—as choreographic work, these disparate fields are borrowing from dance new ways of conceiving their own disciplines in terms of organizational complexity and the relational, affective, and perceptual dimensions of embodiment. At the same time, many professionals in the field of contemporary dance are approaching choreography in broader terms that de-emphasize the primacy of the dancing body in order to explore new theories, practices, media, and performance relationships. Some have claimed in para-revolutionary rhetoric that, “choreography is emancipating itself from dance” and must be recognized as “a practice that is, in and of itself political” (Spångberg 2012). This theoretical dis-embodiment of choreography from within the field of dance can also be seen as a strategic move in the ongoing battle of dance and performance for recognition by those disciplinary fields that, by definition and centuries of philosophical prejudice, have excluded body-related disciplines.

William Forsythe is a choreographer who has dedicated his career to redefining the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries of ballet specifically, and choreography more generally. His recent work has been playing a major role in the current reevaluation of choreography’s scope, and has forged vital new conversations between dancers, architects, curators, musicologists, filmmakers, graphic designers, cognitive neuroscientists, and philosophers. But it is also important to see Forsythe’s contribution to these debates as the logical extension of the work he began over thirty years ago, challenging the ossification of thinking that had prevented ballet from developing into a fully modern—let alone contemporary—art form. This first English-language monograph on Forsythe’s work, edited by Stephen Spier, assembles various histories, theories, methodologies, and critiques of Forsythe’s work from his pioneering analytic approach to ballet to his more recent endeavors to introduce choreographic knowledge practices to other disciplinary fields.¹ Several essays focus on Forsythe’s twenty years with the Ballett Frankfurt, disentangling ballet’s physical mechanics and the cultural forms of romanticism from which they emerged. Others attend to the ensemble performance works of The Forsythe Company and Forsythe’s independent “choreographic objects”—his site-specific and gallery installations that generate choreographic encounters with the public. Several contributors to the book are current or former collaborators of Forsythe’s who offer a range of perspectives and analyses of various creation processes.²

Forsythe has been widely celebrated for revitalizing what many had dismissed as the dead idiom of ballet by asking how it might be spoken as a living and still-evolving physical language, and how it might voice contemporary concerns instead of merely reiterating aesthetic dogmas of the nineteenth century. In her essay for the book, Senta Driver casts Forsythe as a contemporary Nijinsky—a visionary artist of the classical tradition who has advanced the art form at least as much as modern choreographers who abandoned ballet altogether. In his introduction, Spier counts Forsythe amongst the greatest artists of our time for “fundamentally questioning the supposed precepts of his own medium (3).” But for those critics who extol ballet in so far as it strives to refine and perfect a classicized ideal, Forsythe’s search for alternative methodologies and outcomes has been perceived as nothing less than the wanton disregard and dissolution of the grand tradition. In a chapter entitled “Splintered Encounters: The Critical Reception to William Forsythe in the United States, 1979–1989,” Mark Franko insightfully explores the genealogy of the...