Forsythe Brings Mideast Violence to Modern Dance Stage at BAM

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 1, 2007.

March 1 (Bloomberg) -- A woman with a blunt peasant's face steps out from a raggedy, 13-dancer line-up. ``This is `Composition Number 1,' in which my son was arrested,'' she announces before leaving the stage. Then all hell breaks loose.

The remaining dozen dancers enact a street melee seemingly initiated by a horrible onslaught from above. In a silence broken only by the grunts, gasps and stifled cries that accompany bodies fleeing, grappling and thudding to the floor, they display the results of a senseless conflict in which there are no heroes or enemies, only victims.

The message comes from William Forsythe. His newly formed Forsythe Company is performing ``Three Atmospheric Studies,'' an antiwar dance-theater piece prompted by events in the Middle East. It's a far cry indeed from the ``drastic classicism'' that made Forsythe famous. The choreographer -- American-born, though based in Germany for the past three decades -- declares it ``an act of citizenship.''

Politics and dance usually make uneasy bedfellows. But from Kurt Jooss's ``The Green Table'' (created in Germany in 1932 and still arresting) to Paul Taylor's 2005 ``Banquet of Vultures,'' choreographers have at times responded with vehement eloquence to what Goya so aptly termed and depicted, the disasters of war.

Forsythe both personalizes and objectifies these calamities. The plight of the mother, who slowly comes to realize that her son has been killed and is viewed by the authorities masterminding the combat simply as ``collateral damage,'' piercingly illustrates the fact that even a single death of this kind is one too many.

Menacing

Still, the scene I've described is an ingenious example of formal deconstruction. Its violent chaos is fragmented into brief start-and-stop segments that are refracted as if by a kaleidoscope.

``Composition No. 2'' is all talking, no dancing. Against a background of ominous bass notes, a man (Amancio Gonzalez) who seems at first pedantic, then quietly manipulative and menacing, translates into Arabic the mother's account of the experience in which her son vanished. Much is garbled in the translation; much is lost. As her plainspoken memory of the simple truth is destroyed, the mother -- vividly played by Jone San Martin -- becomes increasingly hysterical and grotesque.

Placed between the two conducting this fatal interview, an impassive art-professor type (David Kern) lectures on the similarities of composition between a Crucifixion painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder in the early 16th century and a 2005 Reuters photo of a bombed building, with people racing away as fires rage. (Both images, Forsythe's inspiration for the piece, appear in the program.)

War Victims

``Composition No. 3'' reprises the violent street scene and the lecture of the art professor, who now sorts through the fallout of cataclysm: ``Here's a ring -- with a finger still in it.''

A blonde pixie of a dancer (Dana Caspersen), her Texas- accented voice electronically deepened, represents an amalgam of recent and current American leaders. Addressing the almost inert mother at a photo op, she says, ``You have to understand that this not personal'' and ``Apart from the general state of emergency here, there's no cause for alarm.''

In its indictment of government-sanctioned destruction and murder and manipulation of the truth, ``Three Atmospheric Studies'' is sophomoric at times, but I like Forsythe as an angry man. His subject matter wins out over his earlier, overly intellectual sophistication. Here he seems engaged enough with his cause to allow awkwardness in his art. In the end, incomplete control may actually enrich it.

The Forsythe Company performs at the BAM Opera House, 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, through March 3. Information: +1-718- 636-4100 or http://www.BAM.org.

© 2007 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.