BACK STORY

This week's performances of Ballett Frankfurt at the Brooklyn Academy of Music mark a critical stage in the career of William Forsythe, who has shaped the company according to his singular aesthetic. I've invited the dance writer Roslyn Sulcas, our New York expert on Forsythe, to provide some background. Here is her report:

William Forsythe has been quietly enlarging the world of classical dance over the last two decades. Born in New York, and trained at the Joffrey Ballet School, Forsythe moved to Germany in his early twenties to join the Stuttgart Ballet and has lived there ever since. Although he has been a major presence on the European dance scene since Rudolf Nureyev commissioned In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1987, it is only during the last few years that he has become better known to an American dance public, as companies nationwide have acquired works like In the Middle, Herman Schmermann, and The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude.

More frequent tours to New York in recent years have also meant that Forsythe has been able to show in greater depth the elaborate movement vocabulary that he and his dancers have developed during his tenure in Frankfurt, alongside the inventive theatricality and creative use of lighting that characterize his work. Even if it often strays from ballet’s emphasis on lengthened line and effortless virtuosity, much of Forsythe’s work is engendered by the ideas present in the forms of classical dance. It also looks balletic because he uses classically trained dancers, whose bodies instinctively enact the formal rules (turn-out of the hips, pointed feet, the extension of the spine and limbs, epaulement) that characterize the art form, even as they deploy it in unconventional ways.

The result is dance that (among other things) disregards the vertical planes to which the classical positions of the body are fixed, uses the thrust and momentum of the dancer’s weight to alter conventional transitions between steps, deploys the upper body to generate movement rather than accessorizing the legs, and offers a complex display of coordination and counterpoint.

Sadly, the ensemble with which Forsythe has developed this distinctive vocabulary and a huge repertoire of dances will cease to exist as of June next year. The reasons for the company’s dissolution remain somewhat murky. In early summer last year, rumors circulated that a newly politically conservative Frankfurt city council, which funds the company as part of the Frankfurt Opera ensemble, was reluctant to extend Forsythe’s current contract past its expiration date of June 2004, preferring to re-establish a more conventional ballet company in the city and hoping to cut costs on an increasingly beleaguered cultural budget. (An illogical idea, if true, given the even greater expense of running a conventional ballet company.) After the media seized upon the news, thousands of e-mails and faxes from all over the world, protesting this decision, poured into the mayor’s office, prompting a statement that there was no intention to fire Forsythe. By then, however, Forsythe had decided that he didn’t want to go on in an atmosphere that was hostile to his work. (Subsequently, the city council announced that Ballett Frankfurt could continue if the budget was cut by 80%.)

The dissolution of Ballett Frankfurt is of great consequence to the dance world. Over two decades, Forsythe transformed this company into one of the most consequential contemporary ballet ensembles in the world, creating dances out of a profound body of deeply ingrained physical knowledge. Choreographers need their tools - dancers - and the best tools are those who have been honed into perfect form for the work at hand. Forsythe will, of course, continue to be sought after as a dance maker, and will no doubt go on to make important pieces; there is talk at present of his forming a smaller company that would be partially funded by the states of Saxony and Hesse. Nonetheless, those twenty years’ worth of ballets, the heritage present in the collective body of dancers, is a significant loss to the world of dance, and well beyond.

© 2003 Roslyn Sulcas