AFTER THE FACT

Ballett Frankfurt / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / September 30 - October 5, 2003

I wish I liked William Forsythe's work more. After Ballett Frankfurt's opening night at BAM, I felt an inch closer to appreciating it - as the enthusiastic audience, peppered with dance-world celebrities, clearly did. But no more than an inch. Yes, the vocabulary is inventive (if narrow). The pictorial sense at work is superb. The Forsythe-groomed dancers perform with extravagant energy and commitment. But the dances seem to be telling the same story over and over again - or no story at all. You watch these creations and nothing happens to you. (For "you," read "I" and "me.") This choreography doesn't galvanize my feelings; it leaves my perception of the universe intact. I walk out of the theater exactly the same person I was when I walked in. "I just don't get it," complained one of my colleagues in the second intermission, waving his hand toward the stage as if to indicate the whole Forsythe oeuvre. But he and I are in the minority.

Forsythe calibrated his program - perhaps Ballett Frankfurt's farewell to New York - astutely. Two largish group pieces framed a pair of chamber-scaled works, a women's duet and a male quartet, the public encasing the intimate. Austere elegance governed the overall effect. Minimal music, provided by Forsythe's regular sound man, Thom Willems, or silence broken only by the dancers' emphatic breathing accompanied lush, high-voltage dancing. The "scenery" consisted merely of black drops, in heavy velvet or translucent gauze. The costuming alternately reflected dancers' practice clothes and pajama-casual schmattes - the antithesis of fancy dress that's almost a moral stance these days. Talk about suave!

The Room As It Was served well as a curtain raiser since it presents Forsythe at his most typical. Eight dancers come and go, working in ever-shifting small groups or as loners tangentially connected to the "crowd." Hyperactivity - strikingly, in the torso and pelvis as well as the arms and legs - contrasts with slow swirls that twist off the vertical to spill, still writhing, into horizontal positions on the floor. Small vortexes of motion occur constantly. Sometimes they're charged with a little feeling, even a little drama; more often they look like calculated investigations into the possibilities of the human anatomy.

Images fleetingly suggesting confrontation and combat interlace with tentative, solicitous handholds, as if the participants had joined an encounter group and were sensitively trying to figure out how to get along with one another. Shards of disaffection and absurdity à la Pina Bausch surface too, as in a sequence where a fellow repeatedly attempts to plant a gentle kiss on the neck of an indifferent young woman who doesn't even bother to repulse him but merely deflects his efforts as she waits impatiently for a better offer.

Though the piece is very bright and busy, it doesn't make a dent in your consciousness until its very last moments, when a mid-stage scrim rises, doubling the depth of the available space and revealing a pair of dancers in shadow. A fragment of music is heard; it seems to announce that the show has now begun.

(N.N.N.N) - Forsythe goes in for abstruse titles - uses lots of gestures that lie (in the middle, somewhat elevated, you might say) between pantomime and dancing. When the full cast of the piece - four guys - is involved, clustered tight, with no music to help out, timing becomes a tour de force. The imagery borrows from sports, martial arts, artificial respiration, and just plain goofing around. Fighting and bonding, Forsythe seems to be saying, that's what men do, and the clue to their nature is that they do it simultaneously. Unfortunately, on this occasion, they do it for far too long. The extended proceedings begin to look aimless because, unlike Merce Cunningham - the master of going on at length without many clues to mark where we are, where we're heading, and what's happening en route - Forsythe can't make us confident that his choreography harbors an internal structure, albeit a hidden one.

In Duo, Forsythe shows us what women do - understand the aspects of life that can't be seen or explained and, via this intuition, become one with the inner workings of the world. Although it has its share of Forsythian middle-of-the-body wriggles and slews off the vertical, the movement language of this duet emphasizes long stretched limbs, diagonalled arms suggesting the hands of a clock, the swing of a pendulum. Moments of stasis, alternating with calmly paced action, lend the bodies a sculptural effect and, with that, an emotional dimension. The women seem to be allying themselves with passing time, mastering it by giving in to it.

Women can also, Forsythe observes as a footnote, dress to kill. And he has dressed this voluptuously bare-legged pair in shiny black bikini briefs, veiling their torsos and arms with the sheerest imaginable jet stretch fabric, so that the top of the body appears naked but glamorously shadowed. Having noted what a sheath of see-through black stocking can do for the leg, he made the imaginative leap to what it might do for breasts.

One Flat Thing, reproduced, used as the program's closer, is unabashedly based on a gimmick: It opens with fourteen dancers aggressively rushing forward, pushing before them large utilitarian tables that, arranged in an uncompromising grid, nearly fill the stage. They proceed to dance on top of them, underneath them, and in the stingy spaces left between them. The effect is that of humanity alive and kicking despite a world that has almost no space - space being to dancers as essential as air. Inevitably, the whole business is ridden with clichés: The tables become autopsy slabs, coffins, and the like; dancers not engaged at a given moment stand at the back of the space in a twilight of inaction, staring, expressionless, at the audience.

The piece is almost unwatchable, partly because, as with (N.N.N.N), its structure is ill-defined. Between the initial attack of the tables and their withdrawal, which closes the dance, the activity seems to occur almost at random, utterly even toned, threatening to go on forever, giving the viewer far too much time in which to ask, "What's this about?" Are we watching teenagers rampaging in their high school cafeteria or yet another one of those apocalyptic affairs art is prone to? Both maybe, and in both the spirit of Jerome Robbins seems not very far away.

Thinking about these works in retrospect as I was writing about them, I found more in them to admire than I did when I was watching them. Is this because a central aspect of Forsythe's choreography is conceptual rather than visceral? I must say I've always been leery of choreography that appeals more as idea than as dance.

© 2003 Tobi Tobias