Shortly after the New York City debut of the Frankfurt Ballet, a young arts publicist offered this succinct encomium: "It knocked my face off. I don't know when I've enjoyed an evening of dance so much."
There you have it in a nutshell. If you enjoy ballet that knocks your face off, then Frankfurt's American director William Forsythe is the man for you. Here at the heart of Eurodance, right at the axis of the self-flagellating tanztheater of Pina Bausch and the self-loving dance-theatrics of Maurice Bejart, is a 38-year-old guy from Hemp-stead, Long Island, who knows how to make dance for yuppies: cool, blatant, willful, full of sound and fury.
New York saw a lot of Forsythe this past spring. The New York City Ballet (NYCB) commissioned Behind the china dogs for its much ballyhooed American Music Festival in May. Then, as part of the even more ballyhooed International Festival of the Arts, the Frankfurt itself arrived in June at Manhattan's City Center Theater with five ballets. Forsythe's work was not new to Americans. The Joffrey Ballet--Forsythe is a former Joffrey apprentice--was already performing his Love Songs and the San Francisco Ballet his New Sleep. Last summer, the company performed outside the city at Pepsico's Summerfare. But this was New York and the vaunted New York dance critics, supposedly a tough bunch. As it finally fell out, the critics at the dailies and major weeklies either loved Forsythe or loathed him; genteel equivocation was the exception.
Infinite variety holds no allure for Forsythe. He does not seem to be a choreographer who is much interested in dancers per se. On the contrary, he appears to use them interchangeably. (When rigorous minimalists--Lucinda Childs or Laura Dean, for instance--do this, it tends to focus attention on individuals; all their little quirks stand out. When maximalist Forsythe does it, it's impossible to tell the dancers apart; they all look like Barbie or Ken.)
This undiscriminating use of principals is unusual at NYCB (the recent underutilization or misuse of dancers there is another matter altogether). But Forsythe's ballet did not look incongruous within the context of the American Music Festival, which was not, in fact, particularly American despite its all-American music, a couple of guest appearances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Ray, Charles singing "America the Beautiful." The festival may have sounded American (although one might not necessarily say that of the commissioned scores), but it looked European. Ironically enough, just when Forsythe and the Frankfurt came to town, so did the Royal Danish Ballet (see THE WORLD & I, August 1988), with all three acts of Bournonville's buoyant Napoli. It was heaven and hell; seeing Forsythe and Bournonville was like falling from grace. The Bournonville Virtues are piety, chastity, truelove, faith in God, natural modesty, and a sunniness of disposition. The Forsythe virtues are alienation, irony, discontinuity, vulgarity, hip literacy, and a feverish intensity.
Nuclear War
Even when Forsythe has his eye on a big picture--on social studies so to speak, or political studies--he sees the same scene: We're all sitting around in a café at the end of the world, being rude to each other, failing to communicate, denying the possibility of beauty, acting clever, and waiting for nuclear war.
...
Read Full Article
|
